Confiscate Guns But Not Illegals? OK, Sure ...

We are in the aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting of Sunday night and, as I wrote yesterday here, the gun control types are in full fury and froth about passing a bunch of laws.  Of course, as I also write yesterday here, if the laws (A) wouldn't have prevented this from happening, and (B) haven't shown to be effective, nor give evidence of being effective, it is only a waste of time to pursue.

This may be a problem in search of a solution, and I certainly think that mass murder is a problem in need of one, but what would work needs to be a top criterion for specific action.

Oftentimes you can glean something from the consistency or, more accurately, inconsistency, of the person saying something.  And that's the point of today's piece, which will be mercifully brief.

Long, long ago I wrote that ideas assort, so that people with liberal notions in one topic strongly tend to have liberal notions in unrelated topics, at least where there is a "liberal" and "conservative" side of things.  So it is not particularly surprising that it is the same people who come down on the reflexive, knee-jerk side that says "We have to have gun control NOW", as are the ones perfectly happy to have 11 million illegal aliens roaming the streets.

I thought of that when there was a debate on the TV yesterday involving gun control, of course.  The questioner was having trouble getting the gun-control advocate to say something other than "We have to do something", especially when he kept asking how she thought this or that proposal would actually accomplish anything -- let alone have prevented the Vegas shooting.

The opposing debater, of course, pointed out that (as we seemed to think at the time) the weapons in the shooting were apparently all legally purchased, and that the shooter had apparently passed all the necessary background checks -- a key point of what the gun-control advocate was saying we had to do on a Federal level, and a complete refutation of her position.  Her recommendation, such as she gave any, would have done absolutely nothing to prevent this incident.  Nothing.

So then the opposing debater pointed out that if there were any new constraint on gun ownership -- and the gun-control advocate clearly did not even understand the difference between an automatic and a semi-automatic weapon -- that ended up criminalizing a class of weapons, there was going to be the issue of collecting millions of newly-illegal arms.

And that got me thinking.

I don't know the number of illegal aliens in the USA, but I've heard the number 11 million bandied about, and since the actual number is not at all important to my point, we can use that.  They are here illegally, which is what makes them "illegal."  The left wants them to stay here, rather transparently on the expectation that they will somehow end up being Democrat voters.

In order to further that end, they are quick to note that it would be immensely difficult to round up 11 million aliens in order to process and supposedly deport them.  I mean, that was a big deal in the 2016 election, and that phrase, in some form, was repeated all the time.  It would be hard to round up millions of people, and whether or not that was ever the strategy of those opposing illegal immigration, it would be hard.

But apparently it would not be hard to round up and confiscate millions of newly made-illegal weapons?  I don't want to characterize the owners of those weapons, but I am not really sure that such confiscation would be taken kindly to, by their owners.  Not that I think that illegal aliens would just walk up to the nearest ICE agent and surrender either, mind you, but it is fair to say that a healthy proportion of the public would find a way not to surrender their arms.

And that, of course, is without any discussion of the Second Amendment keeping any of this from happening in the first place.  We're having to set that aside for this discussion.

The left doesn't really care about logistics.  They can make the argument that rounding up millions of illegal aliens is impossible, but then try to make the same case against firearms ownership with them and sure, that's just fine, it will be a snap to round up millions of guns.

But then again, they don't understand that the Second Amendment was put in the Constitution so that government could be duly in awe of the citizens whom it serves; they think that citizens should be in awe of government.  They will never understand.

Of course guns don't vote, although their owners do.  There's always something.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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