Democrat presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton is vigorously campaigning on a platform of more gun control for law-abiding citizens.
She wants an “assault weapons” ban, a “high capacity” magazine ban, and myriad new regulations on gun purchases and purchasers, as well as new record-keeping requirements on gun owners. In short, she wants national laws to mirror the kind of laws we see in Chicago, California, and New York.
The Associated Press previously reported that “universal background checks” are the cornerstone of her gun control push. This one proposal will make private gun sales illegal, which means a neighbor could not sell a gun to his neighbor or a friend to a friend or a co-worker to a co-worker the way Americans have done since 1791, unless they do so with government oversight.
It also means every gun purchaser would be required to pass the same background check Vester Lee Flanagan (Virginia), Aaron Alexis (DC Navy Yard), James Holmes (Aurora movie theater), and Jared Loughner (Gabby Giffords’ attempted assassin) passed to acquire their firearms. And Clinton would use the information gathered from the background checks to achieve one of her other gun control goals: a “national registry” of gun owners.
According to The Daily Beast, Clinton wants to couple the gun registry with a licensing requirement for gun owners. In 2008, Clinton told the late Tim Russert, “Everyone who wishes to purchase a gun should have a license, and that every handgun sale or transfer should be registered in a national registry.”
It is interesting to note that California has “universal background checks,” a gun registry, and a “high capacity” magazine ban, none of which prevented Elliot Rodger from passing a background check for his handguns and registering them with the state, then using only ten-round magazines to go on a shooting spree in Santa Barbara in May 2014.
It is also interesting to note that in addition to the demonstrable evidence that the federal “assault weapons” ban did not reduce crime, The New York Times has reported that the entire notion of a group of guns called “assault weapons” is Democrat-sponsored fiction. According to the NYT, the Democrats created the term in the 1990s–while Bill Clinton was president–to ban a “politically defined category of guns.”
Pertinent to attempts to ban “assault weapons” is the fact that criminals rarely even use such guns for crime. For example, in 2011, the number of rifle-related deaths was so minuscule that they represented only “.012 percent of the overall deaths in America.”
Nonetheless, Hillary Clinton wants to ban them, she wants to compile a list of law-abiding gun owners, she wants to require law-abiding gun owners to get a license to own a gun, she wants to ban “high capacity” magazines for law-abiding gun owners, and she wants to outlaw private gun sales between law-abiding citizens.
Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.