Hi, I’m Jim Bovard. I’m a journalist and a writer. I write about the gun issue. It’s always good to see a journalist we’re popular here. I’m gonna be talking about the ban on the assault weapons. This is the most important part of the crime bill to President Clinton and, but people forget that , the issue in the assault weapons is simple.
,The Assault Weapons Ban
Should people trust politicians? No. People should not forget that the politicians don’t have to follow or obey the laws that they write. Bismarck, the leader of Germany in the 1800s, wrote that foreign treaties are mere scraps of paper that can be torn up at any time for the convenience of the government.
It’s the same way with the gun laws the US Congress passes. If people wanna know how the assault weapons provision is gonna operate, look at what happened in New York City.
In 1967, the city council in New York passed a law that mandated every rifle owner had to register with the city. The city council promised that these registration lists would never be used to confiscate the guns, and the city council kept its promise for 24 years.
In 1991, Mayor Dinkins pushed through a bill that resulted in banning thousands of semi-automatic weapons, claiming they were actually assault weapons. Traitor. Tens of thousands of people who had followed the law in 1967 and registered their guns and never broke the law suddenly were turned into felons because they did not surrender their guns.
The police in New York are using these registration lists to go door to door and knock on people’s doors and force them to give up their rifles. Robbery. Folks should realize that the, gun law in New York, like the one we have now, it’s so vague that it prohibits more guns than there are probably exists, and the politicians did not even try to make it clear.
Tens of thousands of veterans from the World War II and Korea have been turned into criminals because this law made it a felony for them to keep their battlefield guns. Prison. This is the same idea the Clinton administration wants to do. , The Clinton administration wants to turn gun owners as a class into criminals.
The Harold Staples Case
There was a Supreme Court decision back in June on Harold Stables of Oklahoma. This is a guy that owned an AR-15. The BATF raided his home, found the gun, confiscated it, and claimed that that AR-15 was actually a machine gun.
Audience Interruption
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Supreme Court Ruling
With this, with this Supreme Court case that was just decided, what the BATF argued was that the, BATF claimed the guy had modified his AR-15 to make it a machine gun. But this guy gave sworn testimony that he’d never done that and the gun never fired twice for him. , As Steve Halbrook, one of the nation’s leading gun lawyers says, “The BATF routinely confiscates a gun and then tampers with it to make it double fire.”
Once the BATF does that means they can convict a person of owning a machine gun without a license, and you get 10 years in prison. Now, it’s interesting to see what the mi- the Clinton people said in their briefs to the Supreme Court. Clinton said that gun owners must be presumed they’re guilty even when they had no intention to break the law.
, But for once the Supreme Court decided right. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the government’s position is precisely that guns in general are dangerous items, and he said for the Clinton administration, the whole proposition that a person’s knowledge that the item he possess, possesses is a gun is sufficient for a conviction of violating the National Firearms Act.
This is very important. They’re making these arguments because if the semi-automatic ban goes through, you’re gonna have millions of people who are gonna be convicted on the same grounds, people that never intend to break the law, people that don’t know they’re breaking the law, but people that the ATF can go in there and seize their gun and claim it’s, under the list, which is very vague, and then lock them up
And it’s also interesting to see what the Clinton people argued before the Supreme Court. Clinton said that gun owners should be presumed guilty in the same way that drug dealers are presumed guilty. The thing Clinton said is that every person knows that the federal, drug laws prohibit you from selling, hard drugs.
He said in the same way, gun owners should be assumed to be guilty, of owning guns that are outlawed, even if the, gun works fine until the BATF messes with it. This is an example of an incredible expansion of arbitrary power, and the assault weapons bill, this is a symbol of what, of greatly increasing the power of the BATF, because this is gonna vastly increase that agency’s power over average Americans.
Government Overreach & Waco
And it’s absolutely bizarre. Here we are, barely a year after Waco, and when the federal reports showed that the BATF lied again and again and again at Waco, here Congress wants to pass this law that’s gonna greatly increase the power of the BATF over the average gun owner.
Waco was wrong. What happened to due process? This, it makes no sense. , People have to recall that if the BATF blatantly lied to the American public about a high-profile case like Waco, then just think what they’re gonna do to the average gun owner when the national media is not looking. They’re already doing it.
Finally, it’s important to forget that the federal government’s assault on gun owners is part of a general attack on the people’s rights and liberties. Government is massively violating people’s property rights. The Internal Revenue Service is out of control and destroying people’s lives. The government is suppressing free speech in many ways, and the bureaucrats are tyrannizing private citizens with thousands of regulations and laws. It’s time to slash the power of the government over guns and a lot of other areas. Thank you.
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