Monday, October 11, 2010

Obama's recent refusal to allow about a million American rifles of World War II vintage to be reimported from South Korea

One story is that he wants to keep these weapons "out of civilian hands". Overlooking the fact that civilian hands are precisely where the Founding Fathers intended such weapons to be, let's examine these weapons for a moment, and the dire threat to national security they represent.

About 800,000 of the instruments in question are the famous M1 "Garand" rifles, named for their inventor, John C. Garand, and first adopted into U.S. military service in 1936. They are big, heavy, eight-shot semiautomatic pieces, chambered for the .30-06 cartridge used in World War I, World War II, and Korea. While exceedingly accurate and reliable, they are almost as far from being high-capacity "assault" weapons as they can get and still be considered metallic cartridge firearms.

By inference, the remaining 200,000 guns are M1 Carbines, small, lightweight, user-friendly pea-shooters, also semiauto (although a fully automatic M2 Carbine also becme available, and may have been the best submachinegun ever invented) with about the same one-shot stopping power as a .38 revolver, albeit in magazines varying from 15- to 30-round capacity. Originally intended as a substitute for the 1911A1 .45 automatic Colt pistol, they wound up being issued to cooks, radio operators, tank drivers, and other people who had something better to do with their hands than carry a big, heavy rifle around all day.

Going by numbers from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (always a mistake), this million guns represent .004—a mere four tenths of one percent of the 250,000,000 guns that the BATFE says we naughty Americans already cling to bitterly. Four tenths of one percent.

Better numbers, from the firearms industry itself, say it's .001—one tenth of one percent of the 750,000,000 guns (now closer to 780,000,000, thanks to history's greatest weapons saleman, Barack H. Obama) "of modern design, in good working order" that we presently possess.

Three quarters of a billion guns. It's good to be an American.

Nevertheless, the Second Amendment concerns itself chiefly with "the security of a free state". Gun control—more accurately termed victim disarmament—endangers that security, at the same time that it offers aid and comfort to any potential enemy of a free state. Gun control is, therefore, treason. The more guns we have—especially those affordable to individuals at every station of life—the more secure we are. Think what good that million guns could do for farmers, ranchers, shopkeepers, and householders along the border this very minute.

Although some American firearms manufacturers and some dealers will think it's a good thing—just as they did with other heinous and unconstitutional laws written, in part, to act as import barriers (one reason I wouldn't buy Bill Ruger's products for a long time)—Obama's refusal to bring back this million guns from Korea is treasonous.

If by some miracle they do make it back, these fine old weapons, useless for modern military operations, but perfect for home defense along the border, should be distributed, not by corrupt authoritarian institutions like the National Rifle Association or the Director of Civilian Marksmanship—which force potential owners to jump through all kinds of unconstitutional hoops—but to retailers on the basis, perhaps, of BATFE records proportional to sales over the last three years.

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