Obama's assault on the Second Amendment

The Obama administration is planning a second-term attack on gun rights

By Wayne LaPierre

Obama administration officials are deliberately keeping gun owners in the dark about the president’s gun-control agenda as we head into next year’s national election, because administration officials know that when NRA members and gun owners show up at the polls en masse, anti-gun candidates lose.

The Obama campaign’s strategy goes like this:

1. Neutralize gun owners and NRA members as a political force in the upcoming national election by pretending to be pro-gun or at least not focused on pushing a gun-control agenda;

2. With gun owners neutralized, Obama will be able to win the election. After the president is re-elected, he won’t have to answer to voters because he won’t have to face another re-election battle;

3. Launch a full-scale, all-out assault to rip the Second Amendment out of the Bill of Rights through legislation, litigation, regulation, executive orders and international treaties — in short, every lever of power at the administration’s disposal.

Barack Obama spent his entire political career proudly and publicly pushing for the most radical anti-gun positions you can imagine. He endorsed a total ban on the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns. He opposed right-to-carry laws. He voted to ban nearly all commonly used hunting-rifle ammunition.

During the presidential primary debates, Obama even vowed to re-impose the discredited Clinton gun ban, which banned many commonly owned firearms used for hunting and self-defense.

Obama hasn’t had a sudden change of heart; rather, he’s making a purely political calculation by staying quiet on the gun issue until the time is right. In the meantime, he’s gearing up for his second-term assault on the Second Amendment in a number of ways.

Just consider …

• Obama loaded his administration with anti-gun zealots bent on destroying our Second Amendment freedoms.

• With the help of his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, Obama made the U.S. an active partner to the U.N. gun-ban treaty. The U.N. will unveil this unmitigated attack on our sovereignty this summer and the Obama administration has vowed to implement it.

• Obama appointed two anti-Second Amendment Supreme Court justices and continues to flood our lower courts with dozens of anti-gun, activist judges.

• With the help of his attorney general, Eric Holder, Obama led a campaign to demonize law-abiding gun owners, claiming our Second Amendment rights were to blame for drug violence in Mexico. And in fact, emails recently released by the Justice Department prove that operation “Fast and Furious” was a deliberate attempt to build the case for a gun-control agenda.

• Obama unilaterally imposed gun registration in four border states — requiring gun dealers to register the sales of any law-abiding citizen who purchases more than one semi-automatic rifle within one week.

It isn’t hard to see the writing on the wall. The actions that President Obama has taken so far in his presidency clearly show his disdain for the Second Amendment and hint at his plan to gut our firearm freedoms in his second term.

But the key to President Obama’s strategy is keeping gun owners complacent for now.

After all, Obama knows what happened in 1994, when the politicians who voted for Clinton’s gun ban were swept out of Congress. Even Clinton admitted the NRA was the reason Democrats lost their 40-year lock on control of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Obama saw what happened in 2000, when Al Gore built his campaign on a platform of gun control and then watched as the NRA and gun owners derailed Gore in the battleground states of Arkansas, West Virginia and even his home state of Tennessee — costing him the White House.

Obama administration officials know that it’s good politics to avoid making gun control a public issue. They hope that they can lull gun owners into a false sense of security and then play us for fools in the 2012 election. NRA members, gun owners and liberty-minded Americans should not be fooled. Next year’s presidential election will be a referendum on our freedom.