Looking to move the spotlight away from her email-server troubles, Hillary Clinton has weighed in on the two recent killing sprees, offering a gun-control proposal that has two parts, the first being illogical and the second unconstitutional.
Her illogical proposal is legislation that would make gun manufacturers liable for the misuse of their products. In other words, if someone goes on a killing spree with a gun manufactured by the Remington gun company, Remington is financially liable. That’s like saying that if someone uses a Louisville Slugger baseball bat to beat someone senseless, the Louisville Slugger manufacturer must pay.
Her unconstitutional proposal is to issue an executive order that would extend gun background checks to private citizens who sell or give guns to friends, family members and so on. Current laws exempt such transactions from background checks, and Congress has repeatedly voted down proposed legislation that would require such checks.
Meaning Hillary’s executive order would bypass Congress in making public policy (a trick she has learned from our current president). That ignores the fact that the Constitution gives Congress the lead in public policy because it passes the laws that create public policy. As the saying goes, “We are a government of laws, not of rulers,” and laws only come from legislation that originates in Congress. Executive orders are issued by a single ruler.
Granted, executive orders are acceptable and even useful in certain instances, but Hillary’s is meant to achieve an end that Congress has specifically rejected. Congress has refused to change the law exempting private gun sales from background checks. Thus her executive order is in breach of the Constitution.
In addition, as I recently wrote, the one common denominator in all of the recent killing sprees has been that the perpetrators were mentally unbalanced. But had those killers been subjected to background checks, not one of them would have been denied a gun for mental illness because they had no record of a mental illness. One unforeseen consequences of background checks is that these killers, while mentally unstable, are smart enough to know that if they sought help for mental illness, it will go on their record and show up when background checks were conducted. So they avoid treatment and stay mentally ill — and dangerous.
Speaking of unforeseen consequences, a recent report by the independent Crime Prevention Research Center shows that 92 percent of killing sprees since 2009 occurred in Gun Free Zones — that is, areas in which gun possession is outlawed. Again, these killers may be crazy, but they are smart enough to know that being the only one carrying a gun into a place where guns are outlawed greatly increases their chances of success.
