Hillary & Co. Fight a Phony War on Gun Violence.... By Charles C. W. Cooke

[mystery-ak]

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/425229/print

 Hillary & Co. Fight a Phony War on Gun Violence
By Charles C. W. Cooke — October 8, 2015

With the notable exception of Jim Webb, whose many talents seem better suited to another time and place, every single one of the Democratic party’s presidential candidates is in favor of banning at least some of America’s “in common use” firearms. In her recent gun-control missive, Hillary Clinton contended that “military-style assault weapons” are “a danger to law enforcement and to our communities,” and therefore “do not belong on our streets.” On his campaign website, Martin O’Malley boasts that, while he was governor there, “Maryland prohibited the sale of assault weapons and limited the size of magazines,” and proposes that the federal government, should “adopt similar, commonsense reforms.” In 2012, CBS reports, then–Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee “backed a state measure to ban semi-automatic assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.” And, although he has stayed pretty quiet on the question this time around, Bernie Sanders voted to ban “assault weapons” during the failed Senate push of 2013, and would, he confirmed last week, happily do so again.

All in all, this focus is a little strange, for, as Lois Beckett explained extremely clearly last year in the pages of the New York Times, there is in fact no such thing as an “assault weapon.” Functionally speaking, the term is entirely meaningless. It does not mean “machine gun”; it does not mean “especially powerful rifle”; it does not mean “child killer” or “cop murderer” or “armor-piercer.” Except insofar as it nods to an aesthetic style that is popular among people who have watched a lot of 24, it means nothing much at all. To draw an analogy, it’s the “organic food” of the self-defense world.

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[Free Vulcan]

Hillary is simply pimping and vulturing to get her scandals off the front page. This is about the tenth attempt she's made to change the narrative.

[andy58-in-nh]

It is at once amusing and infuriating how the term "common sense" is now used by the Left as a talisman; a magical symbolic phrase intended to silence all debate. 

In this instance, "common sense" gun control is meant to include any policy desired by the Left as long as it purports to stop crime committed by guns. One is not supposed to notice, much less comment on any number of inconvenient facts attending the demonstrated results of such proposals or the logical fallacies behind them.

For example: the fact that crimes committed with firearms are demonstrably higher in locales with the most stringent gun control laws, to the point of proving an inverse relationship between gun control and the prevalence of gun crimes. Or the fact that criminals, being criminals, have not and will not obey the law, no matter the intentions of those who promote it. Or the fact that virtually no crimes are committed with rifles (300 per year), but with handguns. Or that firearms deaths have been declining - not increasing - for years now. Or that the term "assault rifle" is meaningless as a functional description; indeed, it is the invention of gun control advocates who fear what they clearly do not comprehend.