Outdoors in Alaska

Christmas is only a couple of days away. Hopefully, things are beginning to settle down for you with your Christmas plans, travels, and gatherings. This can be a hectic time of year, but it can also be a very rewarding time as well. Enjoy your time with family and friends and remember why we celebrate the season to begin with – the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

If you’ve been following the news recently, you might have heard how the Biden Administration is ramping up to try and get even more gun control legislation or executive orders in place in his misguided attempts to solve crime by eliminating the Second Amendment. I only heard of the following in the last few days.

I’ll paraphrase from an email I recently received about pending legislation in Congress. Currently, there are numerous bills proposed that would infringe on your (Second Amendment) rights. HR6596 and SB3407 are titled to combat the "Epidemic of Gun Violence" but they just want to take away our Second Amendment rights.

These two pieces of legislation would: create a national permit to buy a gun; establish a nationwide gun registry; institute a national 'Red Flag Gun Seizures' law; ban virtually every semi-automatic rifle in America; make it a felony to buy a 'high capacity' magazine; tax guns at 30% and ammo at 50%; put you in jail for buying more than one gun a month; force you to lock up your firearms at all times; criminalize the sale of firearms to adults under 21; ban the sale of suppressors; and, finally, make it a crime to build a firearm in your own home. None of these changes would stop criminals.

Let’s look at some of these ideas. It’s currently against the law for the government (federal and several states) to maintain a gun registry list. The so-called “red flag” laws already in place are unconstitutional as they exist and would be declared as such in a court of law if ever seriously challenged. Former President Clinton’s 10-year ban on numerous semi-auto firearms lapsed in Congress after the very same government that instituted these bans performed studies which showed the bans had no impact on reducing crime in this country.

Buying and owning a firearm is a constitutional right, not a government privilege, so I don’t see how the government can dictate how many guns a person can buy within any kind of time limit. Dictating storage of firearms in one’s own home would violate the terms of the Fourth Amendment.

I find it ironic that the American military can train soldiers under the age of 21 to use fully automation firearms, handguns, explosive devices and other similar types of weaponry, and then turn around in the civilian world and want to ban these same individuals from being able to buy and possess civilian versions of some of these same firearms.

When I was living and working in the Kodiak area, I happened to be in my favorite gun shop one day when a young Kodiak police officer in full uniform complete with a sidearm, accompanied by an older woman, came into the store. He was looking to buy ammunition for practice but under the law at the time (the law has since been repealed) he couldn’t buy the ammo himself. He was twenty-years old. The older woman with him was his mother. She could buy the ammo. Talk about an embarrassing situation! He was old enough to qualify to work as a police officer but was “too young” to buy some tools of the trade.

Banning the sale and possession of suppressors is a dumb idea. Using a suppressor on a firearm is a safety issue. In Europe, a person can walk into any store that sells this item, buy it on the spot, and walk out the door. Over there, the use of a suppressor is viewed as a hearing safety issue and for noise reduction in an area. It’s not viewed as a poaching device or something only a “criminal” would use, as the government sees it in this country.

Under federal law, a blackpowder, muzzleloading gun is, by definition, not a firearm. There is proposed legislation to place all muzzleloading firearms under the same rules currently governing modern firearms to reduce crime. When was the last time you heard of a “mass shooting” being done with a Brown Bess flintlock musket? Me either!

The progressives are trying to destroy this country, but they can’t if we, the People, can resist.