Baum may be a gun guy, but he’s also liberal. He explains — in Mother Jones — how the Left “blew it” on gun control:
You will hear people say gun owners are accessories to murder, and it’s just the wrong way to talk about people. I spent my whole life among liberal Democrats who are so achingly careful to say all the right, supportive things about Hispanics, immigrants, gays, transsexuals, and blacks, and they will say the most godawful things about gun owners, calling them “gun nuts” or “penis compensators.” The gun represents a worldview that we on the left do not share. The gun represents individualism over collectivism, American exceptionalism over internationalism. It’s a totem of the other tribe and we don’t like the other tribe. The tragedy is, we seem to think by attacking the totem we’re going to weaken the opposing tribe, but it’s just the opposite. Republicans love it when we do this sort of thing. It’s their best organizing tool. Gun owners are kind of a free-fire zone for lefties.
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I personally have met very few gun owners who oppose background checks. But very few of them, even the ones that don’t want an AR-15 with a 30-round magazine, believe that limiting the amount of rounds in a magazine is going to contribute materially to public safety. What worries them is being told you are not to be trusted with these things, and that is really offensive because gun owners derive a tremendous amount of pride from being able to live alongside very dangerous things, use them effectively, and not hurt anyone. When a politician or a pundit who obviously has very little experience or no experience with guns, like Charles Schumer or Dianne Feinstein, says to your ordinary gun owner, “You cant be trusted with more than 10-round magazine,” it really strikes the wrong chord.
I’m always amazed at how utterly ignorant pro-gun control people can be about guns. I expect most people to be ignorant about most politics most of the time, that’s a given, but when you see people that are employed as anti-gun activists get confused over the difference between semi-automatics and revolvers, or who can’t explain exactly what the assault guns they’re trying to ban are, well it’s baffling.
Oh, thank you Mr. Baum for telling us exactly what the left thinks of the decent citizen in this country.
And the left not only will not say one bad word about a minority but will say a lot of bad things about the gun owner, and will endlessly chastise anyone who will say a single truth about the minority.
Personally, I think the left has not only blown it on gun control but just about everything else the decent citizen in our country feels is right and just.
On many issues, the Left simply does not have any idea as to what they are talking about. Of course, that doesn’t stop them. I’ve seen 21 year old Liberal Arts majors who have not a scintilla of real world experience lecture Generals on military tactics, firearms experts on guns, seasoned diplomats on foreign relations, and people who have lived for decades in China on the proper role of the Party in Chinese politics. The hubris of these people is simply beyond belief.
Baum says he’s met very few gun owners who oppose background checks. Probably very few who don’t feel that making a big deal about it sounds paranoid, but consider: The law setting up the background check system stipulates that personally identifying records of the background check, if passed, are supposed to be destroyed. Back during the Clinton Administration (i.e., immediately after the law was passed), the government argued that “destroyed” meant “destroyed eventually,” and adopted regs allowing the records to be kept for six months. For quality control purposes, you know. NRA sued, and the case went away after the 2000 elections, when a new administration adopted new regulations requiring the personally identifying data to be destroyed by the next business day.
Frankly, I’m kind of surprised the Obama admin hasn’t tried to change that back, but in the NSA era, they’ve probably just decided to ignore their own administrative rule and just maintain the data in a database indefinitely. You never know when data like that might turn out to be useful, after all. Also, if the IRS email “destruction” scandal tells us anything, it tells us that nobody is ever going to call them out on it.
That’s the real reason for the push for “universal background checks,” of course. A full nationwide registration of transfer system, that will become a full nationwide registration system within a generation, with plenty of opportunity to prosecute people who don’t comply with the record-keeping.
All the Democrat gun owners I know here in southern Maine favor universal background checks. This guy probably mostly hangs out with like-minded people.
Democrat gun owners seem to think its a fun hobby that they enjoy, but the already quit smoking and they can grudgingly live with guns eventually being banned. Their self-identification as obedient Democrats is where their heart is.