Feinstein's New Gun-Ban Bill Likely to be Introduced January 22

Rights stealing scum bag assholes. Everyone that cashes a government paycheck. Maybe the anarchists are right. No government is best. Hell, limited government doesn't work here anymore because those in it will not let it.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.)--author of the federal "assault weapon" and "large" ammunition magazine ban of 1994-2004--has said for weeks that she will soon introduce an even more restrictive bill. Leaders in the U.S. Senate have stated that January 22 will be the first day on which new Senate legislation can be proposed, so that is the most likely date for the new, sweeping legislation to be introduced.
On Dec. 17th, Feinstein said, "I have been working with my staff for over a year on this legislation" and "It will be carefully focused." Indicating the depth of her research on the issue, she said on Dec. 21st that she had personally looked at pictures of guns in 1993, and again in 2012.
According to a Dec. 27th posting on Sen. Feinstein's website and a draft of the bill obtained by NRA-ILA, the new ban would, among other things, adopt new definitions of "assault weapon" that would affect a much larger variety of firearms, require current owners of such firearms to register them with the federal government under the National Firearms Act, and require forfeiture of the firearms upon the deaths of their current owners. Some of the changes in Feinstein's new bill are as follows:
* Reduces, from two to one, the number of permitted external features on various firearms. The 1994 ban permitted various firearms to be manufactured only if they were assembled with no more than one feature listed in the law. Feinstein's new bill would prohibit the manufacture of the same firearms with even one of the features.
* Adopts new lists of prohibited external features. For example, whereas the 1994 ban applied to a rifle or shotgun the "pistol grip" of which "protrudes conspicuously beneath the action of the weapon," the new bill would drastically expand the definition to include any "grip . . . or any other characteristic that can function as a grip." Also, the new bill adds "forward grip" to the list of prohibiting features for rifles, defining it as "a grip located forward of the trigger that functions as a pistol grip." Read literally and in conjunction with the reduction from two features to one, the new language would apply to every detachable-magazine semi-automatic rifle. At a minimum, it would, for example, ban all models of the AR-15, even those developed for compliance with California's highly restrictive ban.
* Carries hyperbole further than the 1994 ban. Feinstein's 1994 ban listed "grenade launcher" as one of the prohibiting features for rifles. Her 2013 bill goes even further into the ridiculous, by also listing "rocket launcher." Such devices are restricted under the National Firearms Act and, obviously, are not standard components of the firearms Feinstein wants to ban. Perhaps a subsequent Feinstein bill will add "nuclear bomb," "particle beam weapon," or something else equally far-fetched to the features list.
* Expands the definition of "assault weapon" by including:
--Three very popular rifles: The M1 Carbine (introduced in 1941 and for many years sold by the federal government to individuals involved in marksmanship competition), a model of the Ruger Mini-14, and most or all models of the SKS.
--Any "semiautomatic, centerfire, or rimfire rifle that has a fixed magazine with the capacity to accept more than 10 rounds," except for tubular-magazine .22s.
--Any "semiautomatic, centerfire, or rimfire rifle that has an overall length of less than 30 inches," any "semiautomatic handgun with a fixed magazine that has the capacity to accept more than 10 rounds," and any semi-automatic handgun that has a threaded barrel.
* Requires owners of existing "assault weapons" to register them with the federal government under the National Firearms Act (NFA). The NFA imposes a $200 transfer tax per firearm, and requires an owner to submit photographs and fingerprints to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE), to inform the BATFE of the address where the firearm will be kept, and to obtain the BATFE's permission to transport the firearm across state lines.
* Prohibits the transfer of "assault weapons." Owners of other firearms, including those covered by the NFA, are permitted to sell them or pass them to heirs. However, under Feinstein's new bill, "assault weapons" would remain with their current owners until their deaths, at which point they would be forfeited to the government.
* Prohibits the domestic manufacture and the importation of magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition. The 1994 ban allowed the importation of such magazines that were manufactured before the ban took effect. Whereas the 1994 ban protected gun owners from errant prosecution by making the government prove when a magazine was made, the new ban includes no such protection. The new ban also requires firearm dealers to certify the date of manufacture of any >10-round magazine sold, a virtually impossible task, given that virtually no magazines are stamped with their date of manufacture.
* Targets handguns in defiance of the Supreme Court. The Court ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment protects the right to have handguns for self-defense, in large part on the basis of the fact handguns are the type of firearm "overwhelmingly chosen by American society for that lawful purpose." Semi-automatic pistols, which are the most popular handguns today, are designed to use detachable magazines, and the magazines "overwhelmingly chosen" by Americans for self-defense are those that hold more than 10 rounds. Additionally, Feinstein's list of nearly 1,000 firearms exempted by name (see next paragraph) contains not a single handgun. Sen. Feinstein advocated banning handguns before being elected to the Senate, though she carried a handgun for her own personal protection.
* Contains a larger piece of window dressing than the 1994 ban. Whereas the 1994 ban included a list of approximately 600 rifles and shotguns exempted from the ban by name, the new bill's list is increased to nearly 1,000 rifles and shotguns. But most of the guns on the list either wouldn’t be banned in the first place, or would already be exempted by other provisions. On the other hand, the list inevitably misses every model of rifle and shotgun that wasn’t being manufactured or imported in the years covered by the reference books Sen. Feinstein’s staff consulted. That means an unknown number of absolutely conventional semi-auto rifles and shotguns, many of them out of production for decades, would be banned under the draft bill.
The Department of Justice study: On her website, Feinstein claims that a study for the DOJ found that the 1994 ban resulted in a 6.7 percent decrease in murders. To the contrary, this is what the study said: "At best, the assault weapons ban can have only a limited effect on total gun murders, because the banned weapons and magazines were never involved in more than a modest fraction of all gun murders. Our best estimate is that the ban contributed to a 6.7 percent decrease in total gun murders between 1994 and 1995. . . . However, with only one year of post-ban data, we cannot rule out the possibility that this decrease reflects chance year-to-year variation rather than a true effect of the ban. Nor can we rule out effects of other features of the 1994 Crime Act or a host of state and local initiatives that took place simultaneously."
"Assault weapon" numbers and murder trends: From the imposition of Feinstein's "assault weapon" ban (Sept. 13, 1994) through the present, the number of "assault weapons" has risen dramatically. For example, the most common firearm that Feinstein considers an "assault weapon" is the AR-15 rifle, the manufacturing numbers of which can be gleaned from the BATFE's firearm manufacturer reports, available here. From 1995 through 2011, the number of AR-15s--all models of which Feinstein's new bill defines as "assault weapons"--rose by over 2.5 million. During the same period, the nation's murder rate fell 48 percent, to a 48-year low. According to the FBI, 8.5 times as many people are murdered with knives, blunt objects and bare hands, as with rifles of any type.
Traces: Feinstein makes several claims premised on firearm traces, hoping to convince people that her 1994 ban reduced the (already infrequent) use of "assault weapons" in crime. However, traces do not indicate how often any type of gun is used in crime. As the Congressional Research Service and the BATFE have explained, not all firearms that are traced have been used in crime, and not all firearms used in crime are traced. Whether a trace occurs depends on whether a law enforcement agency requests that a trace be conducted. Given that existing "assault weapons" were exempted from the 1994 ban and new "assault weapons" continued to be made while the ban was in effect, any reduction in the percentage of traces accounted for by "assault weapons" during the ban, would be attributable to law enforcement agencies losing interest in tracing the firearms, or law enforcement agencies increasing their requests for traces on other types of firearms, as urged by the BATFE for more than a decade.

Senator Feinstein's Constitutional End-run

Senator Feinstein's Constitutional End-run
By Alan P. Halbert

There's more than a touch of hypocrisy in the recent exploitation of the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy by the MSM, Obama, and the Democrats. All the wanton murders due to Fast & Furious (estimated at 300 or more) do not appear equal to one life lost at Sandy Hook. The administration paid criminals to illegally arm drug cartels in Mexico, choosing to supply them with none other than "assault weapons", mostly AK-47's with some Barrett .50 caliber BMG rifles and a few hand grenades thrown in for good measure.

The result was the deaths of federal agents Brian Terry and Jaime Zapata, along with another thirteen American citizens, and several hundred Mexicans. Another disgusting milepost for 2012 is the 500th homicide in Chicago, Obama's and Mayor Rahm Emanuel's hometown. This sad statistic was achieved when Nathaniel Jackson was shot and died at the scene on December 27th at 9:00 P.M. as he stood on a street corner.

The MSM has largely been silent about these tragedies, choosing instead to concentrate on the victims at Newtown. In the process they overlook at least 466 child gunshot victims with 68 fatalities in Chicago this past year alone.

This brings us to Senator Feinstein's attempt to revive the National Firearms Act (NFA) of 1934 with her recently drafted gun control legislation. She will introduce this revamped legislation to the Senate in January in an effort to resolve our supposed epidemic of violence as revealed by Obama in his Sandy Hook speech to the nation. In effect, what this darling of the left has done is reintroduce all of the weapons that were not subject to registration initially.

This is simply a national gun-registration scheme; a synopsis of the NFA follows:

The National Firearms Act ("NFA"), 72nd Congress, Sess. 2, ch. 757, 48 Stat. 1236, enacted on June 26, 1934, currently codified as amended as 26 U.S.C. ch. 53, is an Act of Congress in the United States that, in general, imposes a statutory excise tax on the manufacture and transfer of certain firearms and mandates the registration of those firearms. (Note: bold emphasis is mine)

Originally, pistols and revolvers were to be regulated the same as machine-guns, though they were exempted as the legislation moved its way through Congress. Feinstein's expansion of the NFA will include all of the weapons they had the intelligence to exclude previously.

It is interesting to note that the NFA became law right after the repeal of Prohibition. Congressmen of the day were intimately familiar with how unintended consequences play out from their legislative intent. Prohibition released a murderous rampage of gang-related violence on this nation dwarfing anything we have seen since, leading to the expansion of the Mafia and other organized crime syndicates that are still with us today, another testament to a benevolent Congress.

Owning an NFA weapon subjects the owner to loss of certain constitutional rights, chief amongst them the surrender of our Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights to due process. The possession of an NFA weapon allows the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) to demand inspection of these weapons any time they appear at your door, usually unannounced, all without a search warrant of course.

These weapons are individually registered to the owner. You are not allowed to transfer them without the express permission of the government. Transporting the weapon across state lines for any purpose without government approval beforehand is illegal. This is also applicable to each weapon you currently own. Senator Feinstein's draft does not discuss the waiver of the $200.00 dollar fee to register "grandfathered" weapons in the NFA database.

To legally posses an NFA weapon requires that the chief law enforcement officer (CLEO) in your area of residence sign a BATF form that expressly allows the citizen to possess such weapons. You will also need to submit photographs of yourself, a fingerprint card, and of course, pay the $200.00 fee and possibly a registered Class III Transfer Agent, with his fee as well.

Imagine a harried rural or county sheriff overwhelmed by the sheer volume of requests made to his office. This will probably place many weapons in limbo while the documents are in process. No doubt they will enact some method of holding these weapons while this plays out; probably leading to many lost, stolen, or outright confiscated weapons by attrition.

Not to mention how many LEOs will be required to perform the background checks on individuals for weapons that are already legally owned, taking them away from legitimate law enforcement duties. This will probably lead many local law enforcement agencies to throw up their hands and refuse to comply with these new requirements; again leaving law-abiding citizens in limbo with lawful weapons in their possession subjecting them to arrest and prosecution, leaving many weapons surrendered by default.

I have to wonder how many leftist CLEOs will choose this route? Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark, and Chicago to name just a few cities play host to such officials. Of course, they will excuse themselves with "legitimate budget" busting cover story(s)... if only we had the funds....

You get the idea.

These tactics are nothing short of a backdoor scheme to render legal weapons illegal by redesignating them through the NFA as equivalent to automatic weapons. The result will be a national gun registration database for conventional arms. At the same time, these very same legislators (along with Obama) have encouraged untold carnage and mayhem through policies of looking the other way as regards the inner cities of this nation, Mexico, South America, and the Middle East as our government willingly supplies criminals, jihadists, and cartels with weapons.

Now in their ultimate wisdom, they wish to make pariahs and criminals out of law-abiding citizens by means of an act of Congress that will force us to reapply for our lawful and legally owned weapons for a false premise of security from ourselves.

Discussing the real reason for the Sandy Hook tragedy is beyond the gun control mentality of the leftists currently ensconced into the media, educational institutions and seats of power in this nation. It is simply about power and control... not guns. The action of our president in Fast & Furious and the arming of Al Qaeda in Libya, Syria and the pipeline of illegal weapons funneled by the Mexican drug cartels back into our nation renders this clear enough.

We are in far more danger from these actions of our own government than from another Sandy Hook atrocity by a crazed killer.

The Second Amendment's purpose is to provide for the citizens' defense from all who would deny their natural God- given right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" against a criminal, a foreign or domestic enemy, or our own government. We will witness the end of the Republic if this proposed legislation is passed, since all of our rights flow from the citizen's ability to defend them.

As for this citizen, I will never disarm or surrender my Second Amendment rights, much less willingly comply with such a traitorous act of Congress if enacted... it is actions like these that light revolutionary fervor in a nation and its citizens. It did so in 1776 and it will do so again.