On November 23 the White House focused on gun control as a means of shifting attention away from President Obama’s contentious push for Syrian refugees.
According to a new Gallup poll, the American people oppose Obama’s refugee push by a margin of 60% to 37%.
The Hill reports that “the White House is…looking to shift attention away from the refugee issue.” And it is in the spirit of making that shift that White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest began jabbing at Republicans on Monday, castigating them for refusing to accept more gun control in the wake of the Paris terror attacks.
Lost on Earnest is the fact that gun control in France is far more restrictive than in the US, yet it proved impotent to halt the slaughter of 130 people and the wounding of hundreds more. French gun controls include mental and criminal background checks, yearly mental and physical checkups to maintain the privilege of gun ownership, and bans on entire categories of guns. But none of this mattered.
In fact, it could be argued that the lesson to be learned from the Paris terror attacks is that gun control only makes the vulnerable more vulnerable, while empowering evil people unconstrained by the demands of the law.
But Earnest was on a mission to distract, so he brought up the notion of expanding background checks to include the no-fly list and employed the same arguments ABC’s George Stephanopoulos used against Donald Trump and Ben Carson on Sunday–which were very similar to the arguments the New York Daily News has been trying to use against the NRA for opposing the expansion.
Earnest said:
Members of Congress are prepared to allow those individuals who are already in the United States and are suspected of having links to terrorism of going and purchasing a firearm. I think that is a pretty clear indication that Republicans in Congress are more interested in playing politics and more scared of the NRA than they are concerned about doing the right thing for our national security.
On November 22 Breitbart News reported David Axelrod’s comments that the “Republican caucus fears the NRA more than ISIS.”
Or, it could just be that the Republicans understand that the passage of every new gun law is an incremental increase in the advantage criminals and terrorists have over law-abiding Americans.
Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.
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