Citing polling data with poorly (or dishonestly) worded questions, anti-Second Amendment ideologues often argue that gun control is popular.
The real test, though, is what happens on election day. That’s why it was such big news when two incumbent Democrats from Colorado’s State Senate were defeated in a recall election.
They both represented districts that had voted for Obama, yet they were easily tossed out of office after voting for legislation to restrict the rights of law-abiding citizens.
Well, as Yogi Berra would say, it’s deja vu all over again. Another statist politician has been forced out of a job in Colorado. Here are some details from a local news report.
State Sen. Evie Hudak has decided to resign rather than risk facing a recall election… Hudak, D-Westminster, could have been the third Democratic lawmaker to face a recall over a package of gun control bills they helped pass earlier this year. Sens. John Morse, D-Colorado Springs, and Angela Giron, D-Pueblo, both decided to fight recall elections against them, but were ousted in September in favor of Republican replacements.
So why is she throwing in the towel? Because she thinks she will lose and that would give the GOP control of the State Senate.
Hudak is playing it safe. By resigning before the signatures are turned in, she assures that a Democratic vacancy committee will appoint her replacement, keeping the seat — and the senate — in the party’s hands, at least through November, when her successor will be forced to win reelection.
It’s almost a shame that there won’t be a recall election. Not because I care about whether Republicans take over the State Senate, but rather because I would like to see the outgoing Napoleonic Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, squander more of his fortune on another Colorado contest. He blew a lot of money on the earlier gun-related recall elections, and he also dropped a lot of cash on a failed effort to replace the state’s flat tax with a so-called progressive scheme that would set Colorado on a path to becoming another California.
But I won’t let that little detail reduce the happiness I feel that a political thug has been forced to resign. Particularly since that sends a signal to other politicians all across the nation.
Since we’re on the topic of gun control, this is a great opportunity to call attention to a powerful column by Stephen Halbrook. He explains how the Nazis used gun control to advance their totalitarian and murderous agenda.
Historians have documented most everything about it except what made it so easy to attack the defenseless Jews without fear of resistance. Their guns were registered and thus easily confiscated.
He provides some of the sordid history of the period.
The Nazis immediately used the firearms-registration records to identify, disarm and attack “enemies of the state,” a euphemism for Social Democrats and other political opponents of all types. …The Gestapo cautioned the police that it would endanger public safety to issue gun permits to Jews. …By fall of 1938, the Nazis were ratcheting up measures to expropriate the assets of Jews. To ensure that they had no means of resistance, the Jews were ordered to surrender their firearms. …This scenario took place all over Germany — firearms were confiscated from all Jews registered as gun owners. …Under the pretense of searching for weapons, Jewish homes were vandalized, businesses ransacked and synagogues burned. Jews were terrorized, beaten and killed. Orders were sent to shoot anyone who resisted. SS head Heinrich Himmler decreed that possession of a gun by a Jew was punishable by 20 years in a concentration camp.
So what’s the message. Halbrook puts it in very stark terms.
Today, gun control, registration and prohibition are depicted as benign and progressive. Government should register gun owners and ban any guns it wishes, Americans are told, because government is inherently good and trustworthy. The experiences of Hitler’s Germany and, for that matter, Stalin’s Russia and Pol Pot’s Cambodia, are beneath the realm of possibility in exceptional America. Let’s hope so.
Most people assume that such awful things could never happen in America.
And maybe they’re right. But when you look at very grim numbers showing that the United States is headed for a fiscal collapse, and when you consider that there already has been rioting in Europe as the welfare state implodes, it doesn’t require a very vivid imagination to think that America could face some very tough times in the not-too-distant future.
That’s why I argued, in this interview with NRA TV, that gun ownership is very important in the event of societal breakdown.
