From the 'Rights and Liberties' editor

Apparently, being a statist enemy of freedom is no obstacle to being the editor of the "Rights and Liberties" section at AlterNet.org, if Lilana Segura's views on the Second Amendment are any indication. Early on, she treats us to her lamentations on the fact that the Democrats have become "staunch protectors of the 2nd Amendment" (funny--I somehow missed that).

Gun control used to be one of those bread and butter issues for Democrats, but recent years have seen the party's rapid evolution towards staunch protectors of the 2nd Amendement.

She immediately follows that by quoting a Paul Helmke lie (in fairness, when quoting Helmke, lies are pretty much all you have to work with).

When the Clinton-era assault weapons ban passed expired three years back, few in Congress leaped to renew it. The results have been deadly: As the Brady Campaign's Paul Helmke points out: "One thing the Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University shooters had in common was that they both used high capacity ammunition magazines that would have been prohibited under the Federal Assault Weapons Ban that expired in 2004."

The lie, of course, is that the "Assault Weapons" ban did not "prohibit" the kind of "high capacity" (Brady-speak for non-reduced capacity) magazines--such magazines were completely legal to buy, to sell, and to use, so long as they were made/imported before the ban's commencement in 1994. Underneath the lie is the more subtly false implication that the death toll would have been reduced if the killers had been forced to change magazines more often.



Yeah--more frequent magazine changes would really slow a shooter down.

Of course, easing up on gun control has been critical to the Dems courting voters in Western and Southwestern swing states; the more Democratic candidates have traded gun bans for wishy-washy pro-regulation positions, the more the NRA has rewarded them, upping their political contributions to the Dems.

And why would backing off from the citizen disarmament agenda be so critical for getting votes, Lilana? Could it be that citizens don't like being forcibly disarmed? Could it be that laws that would do so would be in direct conflict with the will of The People, who tend to be none too eager to surrender their "Rights and Liberties"?

Then, she gets down to specifics on Clinton's and Obama's positions regarding guns.

So where do Clinton and Obama fall on gun control?

It's hard to say, they've said so little about it. As a Boston Globe editorial by Derrick K. Jackson pointed out this week:

Clinton has nothing about gun control on her website. The only reference to guns on Obama's is his plan for sportsmen, which includes "Protecting Gun Rights." That section says, "As a former constitutional law professor, Barack Obama understands and believes in the constitutional right of Americans to bear arms. He will protect the rights of hunters and other law-abiding Americans to purchase, own, transport, and use guns for the purposes of hunting and target shooting."

Not too promising.

If, by "not too promising," she refers to Obama's apparent belief that the Second Amendment was included in the Constitution because the Founding Fathers decided to devote ten percent of the Bill of Rights to sport, I agree--but I doubt that's what she means.

Just curious--is AlterNet.org the official journal of the Ministry of Truth?