By Rick Manning
Did you hear the one about the San Francisco, California Democrat State Senator who crusaded for additional gun control being arrested for plotting to sell guns to al Qaeda affiliated groups in the Philippines?
According to CBS’ San Francisco affiliate KPIX, Senator Leland Yee felt so strongly about keeping guns out of the hands of law-abiding Californians that he reacted strongly against criticism of a control bill he introduced saying, ““This is not an easy issue,” Yee said. “But I am a father, and I want our communities to be safe, and God forbid if one of these weapons fell into the wrong hands.”
Apparently those wrong hands didn’t include a well-known leading organized crime figure Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow, who participated in the international gun running scheme designed to help Muslim rebels in the Philippines.
Somehow in Yee’s warped mind, getting heavy arms to Muslim extremists for the right price was nothing to worry about, as he postured in favor of more restrictions in the state.
Yee is not alone in his hypocrisy however.
U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, who never misses an opportunity to push for average Americans to be stripped of their rights, who for years had a permit allowing her to carry a handgun concealed. In 1995, Feinstein explained her rationale for carrying after her home was attacked, and it was not unlike that of millions of other Americans.
“I was very lucky, but I thought of what might have happened. Later the same group shot out all the windows of my home and I know the sense of helplessness that people feel,” Feinstein said, adding, “I know the urge to arm yourself, because that’s what I did. I was trained in firearms. When I walked to the hospital when my husband was sick, I carried a concealed weapon. I made the determination that if somebody was going to try to take me out I was going to take them with me.”
Of course, the Senator was allowed to legally carry a handgun when she felt most threatened, even as she continues to oppose efforts to allow law-abiding citizens to legally carry for their own family’s protection.
In case one mistakenly believed that talking out of both sides of one’s mouth was confined to individual anti-gun politicians, just take a look at what Jonathan Lowy, Director of the Brady Center’s Legal Action Project stated in the wake of a federal court ruling that upheld Connecticut’s recently passed gun confiscation law, “The courts are in agreement that the Second Amendment does not entitle people to possess military-style assault weapons of the sort used to wreak havoc at Sandy Hook and many other mass shootings. While the corporate gun lobby would like to profit from unusually dangerous military-style weapons, the Constitution does not protect these weapons of war.”
The Brady Center, formerly known as Handgun Control, Incorporated, has a long history of attempting to reassure the public that their background check/firearm registration proposals are benign and not intended for confiscation purposes, while urging confiscation when they think they can get away with it.
Compare the cheerleading for gun confiscation in Connecticut with the same group’s statement on March 20, 2013 on Colorado gun magazine ban and increased background checks where they claimed, “Colorado has taken the first steps in leading other western states and the rest of the nation, to embrace change in our gun culture without infringing on our 2nd Amendment rights.”
Apparently, in Colorado the pre-eminent gun control group in the United States pretends concern about the Second Amendment, while in Connecticut, they applaud throwing otherwise law-abiding gun owners in prison if they don’t turn over their firearms.
With this kind of flexible reasoning, it is not hard to understand why Senator Feinstein failed to see the irony of her choosing to legally carry a handgun while opposing everyone else’s ability to do so.
And one feels for state Senator Yee, who apparently thought he was doing the state of California a favor by trying to export all those nasty guns. After all, arming foreign terrorists had to seem like a government sanctioned activity given the Obama Administration’s record of supplying guns to the Sinoloa Drug Cartel in the Fast and Furious case.
In the situational ethically challenged, anything goes, world of the anti-gun left, it is getting really confusing when you can’t make a little money on the side running the very guns internationally, that you are banning domestically.
After all, if they didn’t have hypocrisy, they wouldn’t have any standard at all.
Rick Manning is the vice president of public policy and communications for Americans for Limited Government.