Surprising nobody, Obama decided to use the recent Aurora, Colorado shooting to argue for more gun control:
President Obama has added his voice to the push for limits on Americans’ gun use in the wake the massacre last week at a movie theater in Colorado.
Obama, speaking Wednesday evening to the National Urban League, affirmed his belief in Americans’ right to own guns, but he singled out assault rifles as better suited for the battlefield.
“I believe the Second Amendment guarantees an individual the right to bear arms,” Obama said. “But I also believe that a lot of gun owners would agree that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not on the streets of our cities.”
One cannot believe in an individual right to bear arms but then also believe individuals don’t have a right to bear arms. That’s effectively what Obama said. In fact his statement would have been more accurate if he stated, “I believe the Second Amendment guarantees an individual the right to bear arms that I approve of. However weapons I don’t approve of should be given exclusively to those under my direct command.”
Thanks to the National Firearms Act of 1934 AK-47s are heavily regulated firearms since they are machine guns. The Hugues Amendment then prohibited the transfer of any machine gun to non-police and non-military personell that wasn’t registered by May 19, 1986. Needless to say the price of AK-47s is through the roof because there is a very finite supply of transferable rifles and zero prospect of new ones entering the market. There are AK pattern rifles available for civilian sale but they are strictly semi-automatic and no different than any other semi-automatic rifle that can be fed with detachable magazines (in fact a Springfield M1A, which fires a 7.62x51mm cartridge, is more power than most AK pattern rifles yet is seldom mentioned by advocates of gun control). Of course Obama specifically mentioned AK-47s because the average American links AK-47s to terrorism and communists just as they link anarchism to chaos and violence.
Thankfully gun control has become the thirteenth flood of politics. It’s gets mentioned mostly in whispers but is rarely acted on. On top of that I’ve given up complying with the state some time ago, if they try to prohibit me from owning my AK pattern rifle I’m just going to give them the middle finger and keep owning it. If the state wants to stop me from existing peacefully then I will leave it up to it to initiate the violence.