Rant of the Week: It's Time To Belly Up To The Bar of Accountability

“What the hell was I thinking?” was my morning after-reaction to what I thought was a brilliant idea as I was drifting off to sleep the night before. The thought that keeps reoccurring is that I should be a liberal. Let’s face it, liberalism is the path of least resistance. No fuss, no muss, facts-be-damned, full speed ahead.

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Take gun laws, for instance.

Someone with way too much time on their hands has figured out there are approximately 20,000 gun laws spread over the many levels of local, county, state and federal government. Admittedly, some are flat-out stupid, such as zero-tolerance for gun-shaped objects on school campuses. Eat a Pop Tart that some loonie-left teacher thinks resembles the shape of a gun, and you’re suspended from school. But many laws are dead serious, such as bans against specific firearms because they simply have a militaristic appearance.

Those laws control John Q. Public, the owners of about 325 million legally-possessed firearms; and its true, that’s one bodacious amount of guns in the United States. In fact, there are about 101 firearms per 100 U.S. citizens. The next closest country with a similar statistic is Serbia, with 58.2 guns per 100 residents. The point is, if the owners of those 325 million firearms were the problem, you wouldn’t need the press to tell you.

Now all of those anti-gun laws and ordinances were passed by government officials who blatantly ignore the reality of the Second Amendment. If you’ve ever fantasized about somehow giving some anti-gun elected official their comeuppance, you’ll appreciate what’s happening in Concord, New Hampshire.

State Representative J.R. Hoell has introduced a bill that would allow citizens to put pressure on local government officials to not restrict gun rights. The proposed bill would allow citizens to individually sue local elected officials who vote to restrict gun rights. Think about how many pro-Second Amendment people there are in your community, then contemplate each one of them suing an elected official for voting in favor of a law that would restrict your rights under the constitution. Casting a political body onto the rocks of eternal litigation would be a mighty checks-and-balances system. One would anticipate it would be a rallying cry for all pro-Second Amendment believers – but not entirely.

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A group called Pro-Gun New Hampshire expressed concern that such a law would give the legislature too much power by taking the decision making out of the local level and investing it in the state legislature. In gutting local-level power, the bill gives “exclusive authority and jurisdiction” over all things relating to guns to the state.

On the other side of the aisle, reaction from the Dems is predictable. They say it’s an abomination, and the bill’s crafters will be consumed by a plague of locusts. Apparently, none of the Democrats heard about how their own party in Washington, just two years ago, tried to enact legislation that would have allowed victims of gun violence to sue the gun’s manufacturer and the dealer that sold it, never mind that the sale was legal to begin with.

Then again, maybe they hadn’t heard about it. The Equal Justice for Victims of Gun Violence Act was as popular with the Republican-controlled Congress as a screen door in a submarine. The bill would have repealed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act passed in 2005 to protect the gun industry from an ever-increasing spate of lawsuits against both manufacturers and dealers of firearms used in the commission of a crime. It did not waive liability for damages resulting from defective products among other things.

So far, we’re having an intelligent discussion about differences in public policy. Some of us feel the Constitution is just fine the way it is; others, also known as liberals, see it as a living document that is subject to change at the whim of those who find it inconvenient. It is where the rubber meets the road that the real difference between the two groups rears its ugly head.

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We have often noted that law-abiding gun owners rise to the occasion and hold themselves accountable to a higher degree of scrutiny; liberals, not so much.

In 2012, Jessica Ghawi was murdered by James Holmes while watching a movie in a theater. The Brady Campaign leadership encouraged Ghawi’s parents to sue Lucky Gunner, the dealer that sold Holmes his ammunition. What Brady Campaign leadership knew, and Ghawi’s parents did not, was the lawsuit was spurious. It wouldn’t stand in court under the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, but they still goaded the parents into bringing suit.

The exact motivation behind bringing the action against the manufacturer is unclear, but after three months of legal fees and not a single court appearance, the lawsuit was dismissed. Not only did the parents have significant legal fees, the judge determined that it was a frivolous lawsuit, which warranted the couple paying for Lucky Gunner’s hefty $200,000 defense fees, too. The combination was too much for the couple causing them to sell their home and belongings. The Brady Campaign didn’t seem overly concerned about the couple’s plight, despite the fact that the organization reportedly took in $25 million in revenue that year.

Which brings me to the point: liberal anti-gun factions, such as The Brady Campaign, could care less about the plight of both gun owners and gun violence victims. The former is the sworn enemy and the latter is just cannon fodder to be expended for the cause.

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It’s about time to fight fire with fire, time to use their own tactics against them. Let’s make anyone who pushes an anti-Second Amendment bill belly up to the bar of accountability and cause them to risk their fiances and put their money where their mouths are.

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