A look at Obama’s agenda

January 25, 2009 by George
Filed under: Newbie Info, Politics 

I was chatting with a friend recently (Hi Liz!) and talk turned to…ahem…current affairs.  I mentioned that our president was exactly friendly to gun rights.  She asked me what BHO’s plan was for guns and gun rights.

So here you go, Liz…from the White House website:

Address Gun Violence in Cities: Obama and Biden would repeal the Tiahrt Amendment, which restricts the ability of local law enforcement to access important gun trace information, and give police officers across the nation the tools they need to solve gun crimes and fight the illegal arms trade. Obama and Biden also favor commonsense measures that respect the Second Amendment rights of gun owners, while keeping guns away from children and from criminals. They support closing the gun show loophole and making guns in this country childproof. They also support making the expired federal Assault Weapons Ban permanent.

Let’s break that down, piece by piece.  The Tiahrt Amendment was introduced to attempt to ensure gun trace information is restricted to law enforcement.  It does NOT prevent law enforcement from tracing firearms.  It prevents the results of that data from being shared with inappropriate third parties.  And it prevents snooping by political hacks.
From the ATF’s 2007 trace report for North Carolina:

(1) Firearm traces are designed to assist law enforcement authorities in conducting investigations by tracking
the sale and possession of specific firearms. Law enforcement agencies may request firearms traces for any
reason, and those reasons are not necessarily reported to the Federal Government. Not all firearms used in
crime are traced and not all firearms traced are used in crime.
(2) Firearms selected for tracing are not chosen for purposes ofdetermining which types, makes or models of
firearms are used for illicit purposes. The firearms selected do not constitute a random sample and should not
be considered representative of the larger universe of all firearms used by criminals, or any subset of that
universe. Firearms are normally traced to the first retail seller, and sources reported for firearms traced do not
necessarily represent the sources or methods by which firearms in general are acquired for use in crime.

In other words…you can’t draw any conclusions from the raw data. But that is exactly the kind of conculsion that has been attempted in the past. Smith and Wesson, for example has been a target of this kind of harassment under the Clinton administration. “Smith and Wesson handguns are x% of traced guns. Thus, Smith and Wesson are the ‘guns of choice’ of criminals. We need to shut them down.” S&W was sued by Andrew Cuomo, then head of HUD. S&W was forced to settle out of court, and the resulting uproar in the gun community almost bankrupted the company. It did force its eventual sale. This kind of nonsense is dangerous to liberty. It’s an attempt to use civil lawsuits to force what cannot be accomplished politically.

And that’s why Tiahrt is important.

In my next post, I’ll take a look at the “Gun Show Loophole.”

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Comments

4 Comments on A look at Obama’s agenda

  1. Liz v on Sun, 25th Jan 2009 12:28 pm

    2. Thanks for the info! I don’t think the public knows much of this (what else is new about the transparent mr. O. )

  2. Cemetery's Gun Blob on Sun, 25th Jan 2009 9:48 pm

    3. Thanks for laying this all out so cleanly. I didn’t really understand what this was all about, and how hacks could use this info for civil liability.

  3. What use are intellectuals? | Newbie Shooter on Mon, 26th Jan 2009 8:37 am

    4. [...] As gunnies, we can use this to our advantage.  There are a lot of people taking a very critical look at the left these days.  Now is a great time to encourage friends who are not gunnies to take a look at the gun rights issue. [...]

  4. Saving the Gun Show “loophole” | Newbie Shooter on Mon, 26th Jan 2009 11:19 am

    5. [...] is part two of our series on gun control myths.   In part one, we examined the Tiahrt amendment, and why it was important to gun rights.  In this episode, we [...]

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