Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi dropped a verbal bombshell in the middle of an interview on Good Morning America April 7, and surprisingly, neither the press nor a majority of gun rights activists seemed to notice. Responding to a question from ABC’s Robin Roberts, Pelosi said that while Congress apparently does not want to take anyone’s guns away, “We want them registered.”
Roberts: Under the Bush administration, you pretty much said the ball was in their court when it came to reinstating the ban. Now, it's a Democratic President, a Democratic House. So, is the ball in your court where this is concerned?
Pelosi: Yes, it is. And we are just going to have to work together to come to some resolution because the court, in the meantime, in recent months, the Supreme Court has ruled in a very- in a direction that gives more opportunity for people to have guns. We never denied that right. We don't want to take their guns away. We want them registered. We don’t want them crossing state lines...
Perhaps equally alarming was Pelosi’s dismissal of an amendment on the District of Columbia voting rights legislation that would expand gun rights in the city.
Pelosi made the astonishing argument that the desire by District residents to have a vote on the House floor via a fully-recognized representative is “a civil rights issue.” However, in her opinion, requiring the city to recognize the right to keep and bear arms – that was affirmed by the Supreme Court last year when it struck down the District’s handgun ban – is “draconian.”
“I don’t think that that should be the price…to pay to have a vote on the floor of the House,” Pelosi told ABC’s Roberts.
Translation: Pelosi thinks one civil right is more important than another.
During his presidential campaign, President Barack Obama supported reinstating the federal ban that expired in 2004. In Mexico, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton supported a renewal of the ban.
Even if Pelosi was only alluding to so-called “assault weapons” that the Obama administration would like to ban – as acknowledged earlier this year by Attorney General Eric Holder – she certainly did not make that clear. And even if she were, gun rights activists will quickly point to California, where first there was registration and then came the ban. That ban did not prevent a scumbag named Lovelle Mixon from gunning down four Oakland, CA police officers last month, nor did a federal statute prohibiting convicted felons from having any kind of gun keep Mixon disarmed. Yet Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has called for renewing the ban nationwide, ignoring the California law’s failure to stop Mixon from getting a gun.
California has the toughest ban on assault weapons in the nation.
Last month in Mexico, Holder told reporters that in the Obama administration’s effort to crack down on the alleged illegal smuggling of guns from the U.S. to Mexico, “I don’t think our Second Amendment will stand in the way of the efforts we have begun and will expand upon.” About the same time, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was reminding reporters in Mexico that she had favored a semi-auto ban while in the Senate, and that the administration is “exploring” some avenues regarding these firearms.
Obviously, I am someone who supported the assault weapons ban which was passed in 1994, but it was passed with an expiration date and it expired ten years later. I, as a senator, supported measures to try to reinstate it. Politically, that is a very big hurdle in our Congress. But there may be some approaches that could be acceptable, and we are exploring those.
Whether Pelosi or Holder or Clinton meant to alarm American gun owners – tens of millions of whom have never harmed a soul – their rhetoric has sufficiently aroused concerns. Considering the anti-gun track records of Pelosi, Holder, Clinton and their boss, those concerns are legitimate.
While MSNBC’s David Schuster sought earlier this week to demonize these gun owners in the wake of the Pittsburgh shooting, that’s hardly the way to build consensus. There are no easy solutions, but this much is certain: Banning firearms from law-abiding citizens because criminals use guns illegally is not one of the options.
Check with other gun rights examiners:
David Codrea
Daniel White
John Longnecker
John Pierce
Kurt Hofmann