Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Can anyone find the statement from the Brady weenies (updated)

in which they said 'the real reason behind the assault weapons ban was to get people used to the idea of a gun being banned because of the name', or term, something like that?  Was said after the Clinton ban sunsetted.

I remember reading it, but can't find it right now.


Update: Kevin listed a couple of others in comments, including one that proves that Krauthammer, smart as he is, has a very nasty victim-disarmament impulse.  And, over at his place, he had this from Judge Kozinski:
 All too many of the other great tragedies of history - Stalin's atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few - were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.
...
My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history. The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed - where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.

2 comments:

Kevin said...

I don't recall the Brady's saying it, but there are two that I do remember. The first was from Charles Krauthammer:

"Ultimately, a civilized society must disarm its citizenry if it is to have a modicum of domestic tranquility of the kind enjoyed in sister democracies like Canada and Britain.

"Passing a law like the assault weapons ban is a purely symbolic move in that direction."

The second was from a Violence Policy Center whitepaper:

"Assault weapons - just like armor-piercing bullets, machine guns, and plastic firearms - are a new topic. The weapons' menacing looks, coupled with the public's confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons - anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun - can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons."

Firehand said...

Not the one I was looking for, but quite useful, thanks