Part of New York State’s emotionally motivated, hastily concocted new gun control law requires persons owning ugly-looking guns — semi-automatic rifles — to register them with the government.
Officials may protest that they don’t intend to go rounding up the ugly-looking guns. They may also insist that the new law makes it harder for a newsroom to publicize the names and addresses of gun owners (as the Journal News of White Plains, New York recently did).
But a registry that exists is a registry that can be accessed, and abused, despite any official’s alleged good intentions. Many advocates of gun control, including the Senate’s chief sponsor of a new assault weapons ban, admit that if they had their druthers, they’d outlaw all privately held guns. How would the registry be used then?
Many New York owners of ugly guns are up in arms, so to speak. Why? Because they don’t see themselves as criminal suspects properly tracked for exercising constitutional rights. There are good reasons why good people might refuse to voluntarily add their names and addresses to a list of targets.
Brian Olesen, president of one of New York State’s largest gun dealers, says he’s heard “from hundreds of people that they’re prepared to defy the law, and that number will be magnified by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, when the registration deadline comes.”
It’s not just some guns that look ugly. Turning peaceful people into criminals by a mere act of legislation is ugly in the extreme.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
7 replies on “Ugly in New York”
“A system of licensing and registration is the perfect device to deny gun ownership to the bourgeoisie”. — Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
It is not ugly guns that are the issue, it is ugly people, those being the criminals in the society who would misuse guns, and those who would violate the constitution seeking to register them, as a precursor to confiscation.
2 Comments– the ‘newspaper” that printed the names etc of gun owners KEPT ARMED GUARDS on THEIR PREMISES TO PROTECT THEIR EMPLOYEES.
As a former New Yorker (I left over 30 years ago) the hypocrisy there never ceases to amaze me. THE N.Y. TIMES, WHICH FAVORS GUN CONTROL – HAS THEIR MAJORITY OWNER – I FORGOT HIS NAME-HAS A PERMIT. YET HE GOES TO WORK IN A CHAUFFEUR DRIVEN CAR; DOES NOT LIVE IN A HIGH CRIME AREA; BUT HAS IT.
By the way, Chicago is supposed to have a strict gun control law. yet I saw on the net the other day that 5 or 6 people were shot to death there. Guess that is OK, as the Democrats run it, and they do have gin control. And only (I believe the number shown was) about 7,600 registered guns.
I do not respect the words of pacifists who do not recognize the historic violence of governments against their own people, and who rarely if ever call for the disarming of anyone but the US and its citizens. No one should.
I do not respect the words of politicians and activists who irresponsibly promise that national or criminal attacks will stop through disarmament. It is a false promise and there is no precedent for it.
I do not respect the words of those who have no awareness of the potential for sleeper cells and foreign attackers within our borders, who would be most effective after an EMP weapon detonation.
Think registration doesn’t lead to confiscation? Ask the residents of Kalifornia. It happened there and it can happen anywhere.
If a state can nullify the 2nd Amendment, then a state can also nullify Obamacare, and state health exchanges. And a motivated state could decide to nullify the onerous federal taxes that are collected under the 16th Amendment but that are then spent on unconstitutional things. And the state could also decide what portion of the federal expenditures were constitutional and protect its citizens from repurcussions by collecting the federal taxes itself and then only forwarding the consitutional part.
The federal government ought to be fighting tooth and nail to prevent New York from doing this, because it totally undermines what Presbo is trying to do.
The Supreme Court has spoken on this matter. Marbury vs. Madison, 5 US (2 Cranch) 137, 174, 176, (1803) “All laws which are repugnant to the Constitution are null and void.” “Where rights secured by the Constitution are involved, there can be no rule making or legislation which would abrogate them” … Miranda vs. Arizona, 384 US 436 p. 491. “An unconstitutional act is not law; it confers no rights; it imposes no duties; affords no protection; it creates no office; it is in legal contemplation, as inoperative as though it had never been passed.” Norton vs. Shelby County 118 US 435 p. 442 “The general rule is that an unconstitutional statute, though having the form and name of law, is in reality no law, but is wholly void and ineffective for any purpose; since unconstitutionality dates from the time of its enactment, and not merely from the date of the decision so branding it. No one is bound to obey an unconstitutional law and no courts are bound to enforce it.” 16 Am Jur 2d, Sec 177 late 2d, Sec 256
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
Address to Latin American diplomats at the White House (13 March 1962) [2]
John f. Kennedy