After decades of fighting the gun battle on these pages, I have grown weary. I have also come to realize that the vast majority of gun-grabbers are either cowards, tyrants or simply partisans incapable of independent thought.

Inevitably, after every mass shooting event, the gun-grabbers run to the nearest cameras to express their outrage and rail against life in a free country.

They then proceed to make the most ridiculous arguments against guns. Ridiculous because there is absolutely no cogent argument to be made to infringe on the natural right of humans to keep and bear arms.

None.

This is funny because in the periods between mass shooting events the leftists spend all their time mocking the pro-gun crowd with the spurious claim that “no one wants to take your guns.”

It is patently obvious that if the leftists had their way, there would be a complete gun confiscation program. However, with 100 million gun owners possessing 300 million guns, that is truly unfeasible so they try it piecemeal with “commonsense” infringements … er … regulations.

But any regulation is an infringement and any ban of any class of weapon is a taking. It is comparable to the Fifth Amendment proscription against taking property under eminent domain without just compensation. The government does not have to take the property to run afoul of the Takings Clause. If you buy a piece of land to build a supermarket and the government then rezones the property as residential, your property has been taken because you have been deprived of the most economically efficient and valuable use of that property by government fiat.

Likewise, if the government bans a class of weapons, that is an infringement. If it bans high-capacity magazines, that is an infringement. If it prevents citizens from purchasing a firearm simply because some bureaucrat put his or her name on some secret government list, that is not only an infringement but wholly un-American.

It boggles the mind that any American would advocate infringing the rights of a person simply because his or her name appears on a secret list. Ironically, many of those same people endorse Hillary Clinton, who is under an FBI investigation, for president.

What is frustrating is that the gun grabbers refuse to listen to reason. You can point out that the United States is about the middle of the pack when it comes to gun violence. You can point out rifles account for about 2 percent of all murders. In fact, you are about six times more likely to be murdered by a knife than a rifle. In 2014, 660 people were murdered with what the FBI calls “personal weapons” — hands, fists, feet — compared to 248 with rifles.

Yet, the gun grabbers want to illogically ban assault rifles, despite there is no such thing. During the last assault weapons ban, an assault weapon was defined by superficial factors, i.e., they looked scary so they must be banned regardless of their actual lethality.

Part of the problem is that those who wish to ban guns simply do not understand guns. Shortly after the shooting in Orlando, Florida, gun grabbers such as Susan Sarandon and Seth MacFarlane took to Twitter calling for a ban on automatic weapons. They apparently didn’t know that automatic weapons are practically banned and are prohibitively expensive and are not used in crimes.

There were also calls to ban the AR-15, the modern-day equivalent to the musket. But the AR-15 wasn’t even used in the Orlando shooting.

Perhaps the silliest argument I hear after every mass shooting is that the Second Amendment is about arming militias. Because it seems so logical to insert in a Bill of Rights a clause arming militias?

That is irrelevant anyway. We don’t have the right to keep and bear arms because of the Second Amendment. It is a natural right that exist solely because we are born. Even without the Second Amendment, there is not a single clause in the U.S. Constitution giving the federal government the power to regulate firearms.

But none of those arguments matter to the gun grabbers because gun control is about control, not the gun.

Thomas J. Lucente Jr. is an Ohio attorney and night editor of The Lima News.
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