What Do Democrats Have Against Guns and Gun Rights?

When news broke that Democrat legislators in Iowa had stormed out in protest over pro-Second Amendment bills which Republicans in the Republican-controlled legislature had brought up for  a vote, I wasn’t too surprised. After all, since when do Democrats approve of guns or support gun rights?

But as I read Iowa House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (D-Des Moines) try to justify avoiding a vote for two bills that would have given Iowans a state-constitutional right to keep and bear arms and broadened their grounds for using deadly force to protect life and property, the whole event seemed to go beyond simple Democrat-politics-as-usual and approach instead an example of an ongoing problem with Democrats in general–they hate our guns.

While some individual Democrats politicians and Democrat voters may cringe at that assertion (even Democrats in Iowa), it’s easily borne out by the facts.

Just think back to the 1990s, and even the example of southern Democrats like Bill Clinton prove my point. For it was he who implemented the Assault Weapons Ban in 1994, and he too called for gun control in 1999 in response to the Columbine school shootings. And once the Assault Weapons Ban ended in 2004, who was it that kept begging President Bush to re-institute it if not the Democrats in congress and the senate? One of those Democrat was a previous Illinois state senator named Barack Obama.

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As a state senator he supported a one-gun-a-month limit on gun purchases, supported laws making it illegal to use a gun for self-defense, and opposed laws that allowed law-abiding citizens to get permits to carry guns on their persons. As a U.S. senator, he supported bans on high-capacity magazines and he supported the Assault Weapons Ban. (For the record, when gun bans failed to be instituted Obama teamed up with fellow gun-grabber Senator Ted Kennedy, another Democrat, to try to ban certain types of ammo.)

Or think of what the Democrats have tried to do since coming back into power in 2008. As Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi went on ABC’s Good Morning America in April 2009 and talked of how the combination of Democrats having the White House and the Congress should enable them to reinstate the Assault Weapons Ban. Always careful, of course, to assuage our concerns that she wanted to take our guns, she added: “We don’t want to take…guns away. We want them registered.”

Why do Democrats talk about registering guns unless they want to take them? Historically speaking, Canada registered guns and now where are those guns? Hitler registered guns, and afterward, did the Jews (and others) have guns with which to protect themselves when the Nazi’s came? The answer every time is no. It’s an NRA maxim that should be axiomatic to all thinking people: “Gun registration leads to confiscation.”

Anyway, back to my point. After the Tucson shooting in which Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was injured in January 2011, Carolyn Comitta, the Democrat mayor of West Chester, PA, said the shooting was because there was a “lack of common sense gun laws.”  (For those of you who don’t know it yet, when a Democrat says “common sense gun laws” they’re using leftist-jargon that means gun bans, more paper work for gun purchases, higher taxes on guns, registration of weapons, limits on magazine capacity, etc.) And on top of all this President Obama (a Democrat) is working “under the radar” to pass more gun control.

Now, going back again to Iowa House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and his gang of fellow Democrats stomping out of the building rather than voting on pro-gun measures, it seems fair to ask: What do Democrats have against guns (and gun rights)? Do they hate freedom or do they simply want more power over our lives?