USA Today – by Erich PrattIf you like your Second Amendment, you can keep it.
That seems to be the promise being put forward by many politicians on Capitol Hill, even while they are rushing headlong to renew a gun ban that is set to expire next week.
The gun ban supposedly outlaws “plastic guns,” but it’s so poorly drafted, it’s potentially much broader.
Never mind that the Bill of Rights is pretty unequivocal when it guarantees that our gun rights “shall not be infringed.” But for many congressmen, so-called mild “infringements” are merely an opportunity to get a foot in the door for greater mischief much later.
After all, who could have imagined that an Obamacare provision intended to bar doctors from asking their patients about legal gun ownership in the home would be twisted by President Obama to specifically allow doctors to collect such information?
Or who would have thought that the 1968 Gun Control Act would, decades later, result in more than 150,000 military veterans being put onto a government blacklist and denied the right to buy firearms, simply because they suffer from PTSD or other mental disabilities that resulted during their service to our country?
The same scenario could happen with the plastic gun ban that some in Congress want to reauthorize. The original law was poorly drafted and rushed through Congress to ban a gun that didn’t exist.
But in the hands of an anti-gun president and attorney general, the language could be expanded to cover guns with non-metal parts (even guns with wood stocks). And Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., is pushing anti-gun manufacturing language to expand the law even further.
Supporters claim that we need this law to stop bad guys from smuggling guns onto planes. But guess what? Renewing a ban on plastic firearms will not stop criminals from making them or stealing them, any more than Chicago’s gun restrictions have been effective in stopping shootings there.
Smuggling guns onto planes will still be against the law, with or without a plastic gun ban. And airport X-ray machines will still be able to detect them.
Truth be told, the Republican Congress solved the problem of terrorists carrying weapons onto planes after 9/11 — not through additional gun bans, but by allowing pilots to use guns to defend themselves and their passengers.
Once again, we see that more guns have meant less crime.
Erich Pratt is director of communications for Gun Owners of America, a grassroots lobby representing more than 500,000 gun owners.