On Friday, John Bolton, former Ambassador to the United Nations, intimated that a second Obama term would see the inauguration of an aggressive gun-control agenda.
President Obama’s hostility toward gun owners is not news. Law abiding citizens intent on protecting their Second Amendment right to “keep and bear arms” began purchasing weapons en masse since the day the then-Senator from Illinois announced his candidacy for the presidency.
As recently as last month, the White House was holding confabs in an effort to brainstorm a new, Constitution-ignoring, path toward disarmament. As reported by the Huffington Post:
The Department of Justice held the first in what is expected to be a series of meetings on Tuesday afternoon with a group of stakeholders in the ongoing gun-policy debates. Before the meeting, officials said part of the discussion was expected to center around the White House's options for shaping policy on its own or through its adjoining agencies and departments — on issues ranging from beefing up background checks to encouraging better data-sharing.
Administration officials said talk of executive orders or agency action are among a host of options that President Barack Obama and his advisers are considering. "The purpose of these discussions is to be a productive exchange of good ideas from folks across the spectrum," one official said. "We think that’s a good place to start."
And later, setting himself as the arbiter of who is worthy to own a gun, President Obama penned an op-ed in Tucson’s Arizona Daily Star, wherein he “called for an ‘instant, accurate, comprehensive and consistent system for background checks’ and better record-keeping to ‘stop the wrong people from getting their hands on a gun.’"
Despite the universal understanding that the President has his sights set on gun ownership, Bolton chose to highlight this fact during his recent remarks.
Speaking at the annual gathering of the National Rifle Association, Bolton schmoozed the crowd by accusing the current administration of converting its failure to stymie the murderous machinations of border-dwelling Mexican drug lords into a pretext for clamping down more tightly on gun ownership.
Said Bolton:
We can understand that, as he likes to say, he’s playing the long game, and that "leading from behind" means waiting until he’s elected to a second term when he faces no further political constraints and his true agenda can come to the floor. And I believe right at the top of it is [to] increase gun control at the federal level and at the international level.
There are rumors that Bolton himself seeks to displace President Obama, thus his interpretations of the motives of the White House are self-serving, despite the truth thereof.
The former Ambassador spoke for over 10 minutes, most of the time describing the dire situation in Mexico and the atmosphere of anarchy that has suffocated peace. Bolton warned that if a sterner policy were not enacted, and soon, the crimes and the criminals that plague our southern neighbor would soon annex substantial swaths of the southwestern United States.
As is the practice of other self-loathing American politicians, John Bolton employed an economic metaphor to place the blame for the crisis at the feet of drug-addicted Americans:
If it weren’t for our demand, the supply wouldn’t be there and the drug cartels wouldn’t be there. But the administration in as cynical a political move as I think we’ve seen in Washington in a long time — and that’s saying something — is using this crisis in Mexico and the use of drugs in our own country not to combat the illicit narcotics but to use it as a foundation to argue for stricter gun controls at the federal level in our country.
President Obama has failed, insisted Bolton, to administer a coherent and consistent policy with regard to the problem. He continued by indicting the President and his cabinet for purposefully mishandling the affair in order that it might be protracted in incite fear along the border. In turn, fearful Arizonans, New Mexicans, and Texans would begrudgingly exchange freedom for safety.
“When they do talk about what’s happening in Mexico, our government, our White House follows the Mexican line by saying that the real problem of drug-related violence in Mexico is caused by guns that have come illegally across the U.S.-Mexican border,” Bolton claimed.
He added, as if the point weren’t already fine enough:
This is something that is music to the ears of the gun control advocates in this country, because they can say, "See, actually, it’s our lack of gun controls, our lack of enforcement, that’s the real cause of the problem. So stiffer gun controls in the United States will solve the problem of drug violence in Mexico and prevent it from coming here."
Ironically, given his own manipulation of the drug-abuse epidemic and its effect on weapons dealing, Bolton proceeded to mock those who would use the specter of Mexican atrocities being exported across the border as a pretext for augmenting the strictures on gun ownership.
The idea that what’s going on in Mexico is somehow our fault because of lax gun control laws here is exactly the kind of subterfuge that the Obama administration would like to carry forward in the near future to get stronger gun control laws here, and it will provide a foundation for their argument (on) why the United States will have to enter into, in short order, the United Nations-negotiated arms trade treaty. If Bolton is to be believed, a draft version of the agreement is being circulated among anti-gun legislators and lobbyists. This particular draft is a lot less onerous than it could be. It just raises the question of whether they want to hurry this draft through to completion to try and get it considered by the Senate before the next election or whether they’re putting it out as a placeholder for negotiations to be concluded after President Obama wins his next term in office because that’s what they’re looking for.
For its part, Bolton’s hosts were effusive in their praise of his message and his work in defense of the Second Amendment.
Said Chris Cox, the executive director of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action:
When the United Nations wanted to restrict the rights of law abiding Americans to own firearms, this man reminded them that, in the United States, the right to keep and bear arms is not negotiable. He told the UN that they must conform to our Constitution, not the other way around.
Regardless of the passing mention of the Constitution, neither John Bolton, Chris Cox, nor anyone else with the NRA stood and defended the prohibitions against the power of the legislative branch to abridge the rights protected by the Second Amendment. There is no mention in the Constitution of “lawful” gun ownership, the rights of hunters, or waiting periods, all of which have been accepted by the NRA for decades.
Photo of John Bolton: AP Images
