January 6, 2016 at 3:45 p.m.
Guns
Guns
Perhaps the biggest flaw is in the process - as in the process by which we make laws in this country, you know, according to the United States Constitution.
The state-run media has been peddling the idea that Obama is only clarifying existing law, not making new law, but as usual that is government propaganda. Make no mistake about it, Obama is attempting to make law by subjecting those who engage in private gun transactions every once in a while - with a relative or friend, for instance - to federal licensing requirements for dealers.
According to Obama, you can be "engaged in the business" as a firearms dealer even when you undertake just a few transactions, if you combine that with certain other factors, such as if you use your Square to make those transactions with a credit card. That's absurd. Everybody can process credit cards these days, if they want to. That doesn't necessarily put them in the business of anything.
To the specific point, the law does not allow the administration to consider those "other factors" in determining who is a dealer and who is not, and that is very clear enough; it needs no presidential clarifying.
That is, the law exempts those making only private, occasional sales of guns, and it doesn't matter if they rent a table or process a credit card to do it. "Occasional" is the controlling factor, not frequency combined with other factors, and any attempt to make it the latter is an attempt to amend the law.
But an administration cannot amend the law, and that's where process comes in. The president is attempting to usurp legislative powers and in so doing he is violating the constitution.
We know the president must be frustrated because he cannot get Congress to go along with him - even many Democrats - but under our system he is obligated to do so or move on along. The very attempt to use executive actions to thwart the will of the people's elected representatives smells of dictatorship.
The president is certainly free to use his bully pulpit to make his case and try to influence this year's elections, but he is not free to make the law of the land. And neither, by the way, is Hillary Clinton, who is also saying she will bypass Congress if she is elected president.
Beyond the arrogance, some other components of the president's plan are wayward and dangerous, even delusional, as Carly Fiorina has said. For instance, how about the idea of prohibiting people with "documented mental health issues" from buying guns, even without any official judicial determination of mental incompetence?
What this means is that government bureaucrats will be deciding your mental competence and your Second Amendment fate. When that happens, it's Katy bar the door.
What's more, the president wants to let your doctor report you to the FBI if he or she decides you are too mentally unstable to have a gun. Or what if the health care provider simply doesn't like guns and reports anybody he or she suspects of having one as being mentally unstable? Right now, your doctor cannot report you for any reason, but Obama sees this, to use the administration's words, as "an unnecessary legal barrier."
Imagine that. To the government, your private information is an unnecessary barrier to its whims and wishes. Your private information is an obstacle to its ability to control you.
The most troubling aspect of this scenario is that it turns health care providers into law enforcement, and that is a big problem in a country that is moving ever closer to police state status.
Everybody is becoming deputized. Almost every government agency now has its own police force, often a militarized one, and now the government is enlisting the private sector to enforce its laws, too.
Around every corner is a government snitch these days, and it's even worse when the snitch is your doctor, who knows some of your most intimate details.
Aside from deputizing doctors, Obama has big plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to man up the gun police. He wants more agents and better technology - all the better to spy on you - and he wants to spend millions more in research to support it all.
At the end of the day, the president is growing the power of the government specifically to take away the powers of the citizenry, especially our ability to defend ourselves.
What all of this boils down to is a rather transparent attempt at gun confiscation. If one cannot possess a gun, you must give it up, and, if one cannot buy a gun, the government is confiscating your right to have one in the future. Remember, to Obama, anyone who desires to own a gun must be, by definition, mentally unstable.
It's a dangerous path Obama has announced, but it is even more dangerous when one considers that, while our president spends his time trying to neuter the American population, he is neglecting the one population he should be trying to disarm: terrorists.
On the terrorist front, Obama is missing in action. Days before the Paris attacks, he told the media he had ISIS contained. And he was assuring us no attacks would happen on American soil right as San Bernardino was happening.
Little wonder Americans want to arm themselves to defend their families, their property, and their way of life.
Obama certainly can't be trusted to defend those things. We can only hope that the next year passes quickly, and that Obama's offensive against gun ownership by Americans is as inept as his war against the terrorists has been.
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