National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre is locked in a no-holds-barred fight with President Barack Obama over the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. Today Fox News Sunday featured top surrogates for both, former Rep. Asa Hutchinson for LaPierre and White House Senior Advisor Dan Pfeiffer for Obama. Right now there can be no doubt that the NRA is beating the president of the United States, and a quick reminder of one of Obama’s past positions reminds everyone where he’s trying to go with this.
The NRA funded an independent task force headed by Hutchinson. This past week the task force came out with a 225-page report, recommending formally-trained armed security guards (preferably police officers) in every school in America. As LaPierre said months ago, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
Pfeiffer was on the Sunday news shows today trying to sell his increasingly-unpopular boss’ agenda. Part of that was pushing gun control. He touted one part of Obama’s plan—requiring universal background checks—enjoys 90% popular support (as long as you don’t explain the details to that 90%).
Yet on Obama’s package, Sen. Harry Reid told reporters he doesn’t even have 40 senators, to say nothing of the 60 needed to move controversial legislation in the U.S. Senate.
As the White House is becoming increasingly desperate to pass gun control, Pfeiffer said the proposed package includes only, “commonsense measures completely consistent with supporting the Second Amendment.”
But everyone needs to keep in mind what Obama thinks the Second Amendment does and does not protect. He was always a staunch supporter of the Chicago Gun Ban. In Chicago, no one—not even law-abiding citizens—could have any handguns in their own home for self-defense. The Supreme Court struck down this ban as unconstitutional in the 2010 case McDonald v. Chicago.
Obama promises he supports the right to keep and bear arms. But in the same breath he says that the government completely banning you having arms is somehow not a contradiction of his promise.
Comparing other constitutional rights shows how absurd this is. It’s like saying you support free speech, but at the same time the government can ban criticizing the government or commenting on any public issue. Or it’s like saying you support religious liberty, but the government can ban you from going to church or reading the Bible. A right you cannot exercise is no right at all.
Gun owners aren’t fooled. They know Obama’s gun-control agenda is not commonsense, and instead of supporting the Second Amendment it is instead a frontal assault on one of our fundamental rights secured by the Constitution.
Breitbart News legal columnist Ken Klukowski is on faculty at Liberty University School of Law and a published scholar on the Second Amendment.
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