Anti-gun extremist Jeffrey Zalles, who serves as president of the Marin County, California chapter of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, is reaching back in recent history to push what amounts to a gun ban that doesn’t focus on guns themselves but the ammunition people need and must have to exercise their Second Amendment rights.
Zalles began his recent editorial in The Washington Post by referring to a second anti-gun crusader, Nicholas Kristof, who wrote in The New York Times this past August “that gun violence claims one life every 16 minutes in the United States.” Kristof did not back up his spurious claim with any empirical evidence a uses the statistic to say “more than 90 American families are broken by gun violence every day.”
This claim could only be true if Zalles and Kristof lump Chicago gang violence, disputes between drug dealers settled at the point of a gun, robberies, home invasions and more with one thing in common – that these criminal acts were committed by those who care little for our laws against murder and not at all about our laws regarding guns.
Zalles solution it to create a hole big enough in the Second Amendment to drive a truck through and does just that when it comes to licensing, rationing, microstamping and even banning ammunition – efforts that would not take away the right to Keep and Bear Arms but take away ammunition in a way that renders the Second Amendment meaningless.
Zalles laments the fact that the National Rifle Association (NRA) – the nation’s leading pro-gun group has stood in the way of “meaningful” gun laws that would “achieve” significant reductions in his gun violence “statistic” and ignores the rapes, killings, robberies, kidnappings and other criminal horrors prevented by the use of firearms by law-abiding citizens in self-defense.
But Zalles take heart in his belief that the NRA is not “forever” and that there will come a tipping point “whereby a majority of Americans, fed up and fearing for their safety, will finally work their will in the form of strict gun-control measures or even a rewrite or repeal of the Second Amendment.”
So for now, Zalles thinks making it difficult to access ammunition will neutralize the ability of gun owners to exercise their gun rights without restricting their access to firearms.
This is the same fascist thinking that gave us “poll taxes” and “literacy tests” to give people the right to vote but only if they could negotiate the speed bumps and road blocks set up to make voting as difficult as possible.
To burnish the validity of his strategy to limit the ability of gun owners to use their firearms by going after the ammunition, Zalles noted that late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said there was a 200 year supply of gun in the United States but only a four-year supply of ammunition.
So Zalles proposes “two steps (that) would work wonders” in fighting gun violence.
The first is to license ammunition buyers – that next best thing to gun registration itself. He proposes “several” non-threatening requirements to gain a license like watching a video, answering a few questions about gun safety, producing some form of photo ID, paying as small fee and passing a passing a background check.
What he leaves out is that if the government knows who has the ammunition, the government knows who has the guns. What’s more, once any part Zalles “ammunition registration” scheme is in place, the government can play with the gun rights of law-abiding people around the edges.
A “small fee” could become a “big fee”. Some form of photo ID could become a government ID issued by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE). A gun safety test could become a questionnaire, completed under penalty of perjury, requiring you to disclose the types and number of firearms you own.
And Zalles doesn’t ask for a “criminal” background check, he only wants a “background check” that could include questions about military service, treatment for mental health issues, the number of children you have your home – you name it.
Zalles’s second step is to make ammunition too hard or too expensive to make – and that means “microstamping” ammunition at point of manufacture. That’s right, All ammunition would be marked so ammunition could be traced back to the buyer.
Setting the cost of microstamping aside, criminals could gain access to ammunition and simply deface the markings on the round. It would also put a crimp in those gun owners who load their own ammunition. Would these gun owners have to enter into some tortured registration regime overseen by government bureaucrats on the ammo they reload?
And while Zalles says “a focus on ammunition wouldn’t infringe on the rights of law-abiding gun owners”, he is woefully ignorant in what it takes to be a gun owner and the havoc politicians and bureaucrats to rain down on the right to Keep and Bear Arms.
A government that could impose a poll tax or literacy test on American’s wishing to exercise the franchise could easily take nice sounding well-reasoned and incremental steps against ammunition and turn them up into roadblocks that would stop the right of all law-abiding gun owners to use firearms for hunting, shooting and self-defense dead their tracks.
