Divide and
Conquer: Giffords (Formerly LCAV) Looks to Split Gun Owners to Enact Controls
NRA-ILA
Monday, August 26, 2019
Divide et impera; divide and rule; divide and
conquer. For millennia political actors have understood that one of the most
effective means of defeating your enemy is to divide them and set the component
parts against each other. For what seems nearly as long, gun control supporters
have sought to separate gun owners from their rights by using this strategy.
The civilian disarmament industry’s latest attempt to
split gun owners comes courtesy of Giffords. In recent weeks, the group has
been promoting its newly-concocted and misleadingly-named state “Gun Owners for
Safety” groups. For those unfamiliar with the gun control movement’s
perpetual rebranding schemes, Giffords is a combination of the gun
control groups Americans for Responsible Solutions and the San Francisco-based
Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which was previously named the Legal
Community Against Violence (LCAV).
According to the materials for the Minnesota “Gun Owners
for Safety” franchise, the “group” consists of “gun owners who support
commonsense gun safety laws.” The document focuses on three of these so-called
“commonsense” measures.
The first enumerated gun control measure is state “Red
Flag” or “Extreme Risk Protection Order” laws. As supported by Giffords, such
legislation empowers courts to strip an individual’s Second Amendment rights
and seize their firearms based merely on the petition of another person. As
passed in several jurisdictions, the rescindment of a person’s rights and
seizure of their firearms can occur even before a hearing where the respondent
can tell his or her side of the story and present evidence with the aid of
counsel. These existing “Red Flag” laws are a gross violation of the right to
procedural due process.
The second measure the dubious “group” supports is
so-called “universal background checks,” better described as the
criminalization of private firearm transfers. According to the Giffords
materials, the absence of this restriction “dramatically increase[es] the
likelihood of gun murders and suicides.” In truth, a comprehensive survey
of the available data on firearms background checks conducted by the RAND
Corporation found that “[e]vidence of the effect of private-seller background
checks on firearm homicides is inconclusive.” Moreover, researchers from the
anti-gun UC Davis School of Medicine Violence Prevention Program and Johns
Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health determined that
enactment of California’s comprehensive background check policy “was not
associated with a net change in the firearm homicide rate over the ensuing 10
years in California.”
The propaganda also claims that 90 percent of Americans
support the criminalization of private firearm transfers. That factoid does not
represent real world voting patterns. When so-called “universal background
check” legislation was on the ballot in Maine and Nevada in 2016, Maine voters
rejected it, while Nevadans passed by a razor-thin margin of 50.45 percent to
49.55 percent.
The third anti-gun measure the artificial organization
advances is federal funding for “gun violence research.” The federal government
can and does conduct research on violence perpetrated with firearms.
Understanding that federal tax dollars should not be used, as they had been,
to promote a view that denigrates the rights of Americans, the U.S. Congress
has prohibited the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention from using its funding to “advocate or promote gun
control.” Moreover, gun control-promoting researchers have found no shortage of
private funding, from the likes of Billionaire Michael Bloomberg and others, to
advance their cause.
Curiously, the Minnesota “Gun Owners for Safety” brochure
doesn’t highlight some of Giffords’ other gun control policy positions. The
materials make no mention of the group’s support for a ban on commonly-owned
semi-automatic firearms and their magazines and their staunch opposition to the
Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act.
The pamphlet also doesn’t elaborate on Giffords’ history.
The “Gun Owners for Safety” materials give lip service to
the Second Amendment, and state, “The Second Amendment is an important right
that many Americans value highly.” The mission of the group is purportedly, “To
support commonsense gun violence prevention laws while respecting the Second
Amendment and promoting gun safety.” However, this is a far cry from what LCAV,
a Giffords component, used to say about the Second Amendment.
Prior to District of Columbia v. Heller, LCAV adopted the collective rights
interpretation of the Second Amendment. In 1998, one-time LCAV Legal Director Juliet
Leftwich wrote in a piece for the San Francisco Chronicle titled, “2nd Amendment Argument Is Myth,”
that described the notion that the Second Amendment precluded certain gun
control measures as “NRA propaganda.”
In a 1995 document still
available on the Giffords website, LCAV contended,
The Second Amendment was written to ensure that every
state would have the ability to maintain its own militia. It was not, as the
gun lobby argues, intended to establish an unlimited, private right of gun
ownership or possession. If the drafters of the Bill of Rights had intended to
guarantee such an individual right, they could (and would) have done so.
As for specific gun control policies, in a 2010 document LCAV
referred to the following measures as “Best Practices:” Mandatory licensing to
acquire or possess any firearms or ammunition; complete firearms registration;
a prohibition on the “carrying of concealed firearms;” a ban on commonly-owned
semi-automatic firearms; a ban on the possession of firearms magazines with the
capacity to hold more than 10 rounds; handgun microstamping; and a ban on
.50-caliber rifles.
At an August 20th event launching the Texas iteration of
“Gun Owners for Safety,” former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was
accompanied by former ATF agent and gun control enhusiast David Chipman. Most
recently, the former agent misled the public
in the wake of the Virginia Beach shooting by claiming that a suppressed
firearm “makes a gun sort of sound like a nail gun.” In reality, a suppressed
.45 caliber pistol is about 30-35 decibels louder than a nail gun (i.e., about
8 times louder to the human ear). Chipman has also advanced
a proposal to regulate all commonly-owned semi-automatic firearms like the
AR-15 in the same manner as fully-automatic machineguns under the National
Firearms Act. Along with the LCAV positions, Chipman’s statements didn’t make
it to the Texas “Gun Owners for Safety” website.
As noted, the divide and conquer strategy is nothing new
among gun controllers. Mid-to-late 20th century gun control advocates were
primarily focused on prohibiting the civilian ownership of handguns. The
anti-gun groups of the period routinely tried to split “legitimate” sportsmen
from handgun owners. A 1970s pamphlet from Brady precursor the National Council
to Control Handguns assured readers that.
We don’t want to prohibit all firearms. We’re not
trying to deprive America’s hunters of their rifles and shotguns. These
weapons, which are not easily concealable, are seldom involved in violent
crime.
Similarly, anti-gun politicians like Bill Clinton and John Kerry have
posed as gun-toting sportsmen in an attempt to split apart the gun owner
coalition.
In the mid-2000s there was the American Hunters and Shooters
Association (AHSA), which was a thinly-veiled attempt to mislead and
divide gun owners. Like the new Giffords branch, AHSA was run and funded by
ardent gun control supporters such as Handgun Control Inc. donor Ray Schoenke
and Stop Handgun Violence founder John Rosenthal.
Giffords’ new group is one more in a long line of
attempts to divide gun owners with misleading information and muddying of the
gun control lobby’s ultimate goals. Given Giffords’ long and documented history
of support for radical gun control and outright hostility towards the Second
Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms, this latest charade is more
transparent and shameless than most.
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