Bipartisan Congressional Effort to Usurp Constitutional Rights on Guns Coming?
by Steve Byas
TheNewAmerican.com
Friday, 14 December 2018
Americans who value the right to keep and bear arms are largely complacent about that right, content that the Second Amendment rather clearly protects a citizen’s right. After all, they smugly tell themselves, did not the Supreme Court specifically, a few years ago in the Heller decision, confirm that the Second Amendment protects the right as an individual right?
That is all true, yet the words of Congressman John Randolph, a cousin of Thomas Jefferson, are quite applicable to today, when he said the Constitution of the United States is “just parchment” — just words — unless we are prepared to make sure government officials follow that document.
Resting right now in the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations is a very dangerous bill, — H.R. 5717, the Jake Laird Act of 2018 — that threatens every American’s right to keep and bear arms, despite the clear wording of the Second Amendment. It is a bipartisan bill. It even has a Republican sponsor, Susan Brooks of Indiana, lest one think that the threat to the Second Amendment rests only with Democrats. In fact, the bill has 15 co-sponsors, and only six are Democrats. Nine co-sponsors are Republicans.
The Brooks bill proposes to authorize the attorney general of the United States “to make grants to States that have in place laws that authorize the seizure of firearms from dangerous individuals, and for other purposes.”
This is a method that has been used frequently to get states to bend the knee to the federal government, basically bribing them with “federal” money. Several decades ago, when the federal government decreed the states should lower their speed limits to 55 miles an hour or face the loss of federal highway funds, all 50 states meekly complied. Brooks’ bill provides for $50 million to implement the bill.
So, don’t smugly think that your state would not comply. And don’t look to the White House for a presidential veto, were this bill to pass Congress. President Donald Trump has already indicated that he would be open to a law that takes guns away from “dangerous” Americans, and worry about “due process” later.
But exactly who is a “dangerous” individual? Is it someone who has been convicted of a crime, or even arrested and charged with a crime? Not under Brooks’ bill.
The Rest…HERE
