Tar and feather gun control advocate wherever you find them. Starting with Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton.
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The Second Amendment
of the United States Constitution reads: "A well regulated Militia,
being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people
to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Second Amendment | Wex Legal Dictionary / Encyclopedia | LII / Legal ...
------------http://www.vox.com/2016/6/14/
The rise, fall, and rise again of Hillary Clinton's passion for gun control
Updated by Dylan Matthews on June 14, 2016, 3:20 p.m. ET
Speaking about America’s gun violence problem after Sunday’s mass shooting in Orlando, which now ranks as the country’s deadliest, Hillary Clinton sounded remarkably different than she did the last time she ran for president.
"I believe weapons of war have no place on our streets. We may have our disagreements about gun safety regulations, but we should all be able to agree on a few essential things," she said on Monday.
But late in the 2008 Democratic primary, as then-Sen. Barack Obama was being roundly condemned for saying Rust Belt voters "cling to guns or religion," his rival Hillary Clinton joined in, saying that Obama’s comments offended her on a personal level, as she came from a family of gun owners.
"You know, my dad took me out behind the cottage that my grandfather built on a little lake called Lake Winola outside of Scranton and taught me how to shoot when I was a little girl," she told a crowd in Indiana. "It’s part of culture. It’s part of a way of life. People enjoy hunting and shooting because it’s an important part of who they are."
Minutes after that, in what CNN called a "slightly awkward moment," the mother of a child paralyzed by a gunshot asked Clinton if she was serious about gun control. "There is not a contradiction between protecting Second Amendment rights" and reducing crime, Clinton replied.
Eight years later, you’re not likely to hear Clinton defend gun ownership so passionately; if she expresses respect for guns at all, it’s as a caveat before arguing for serious measures to crack down on firearm violence. This time around, her stated position on the issue is clear. She wants comprehensive, universal background check legislation. She wants to repeal civil immunity for gun manufacturers. She wants to ban assault weapons, ban the severely mentally ill and domestic abusers from buying guns, and use executive powers to limit the current gun show loophole to background checks. She attacked Bernie Sanders repeatedly for being excessively pro-gun.
But like most longtime Democratic politicians, Clinton’s passion for gun control has waxed and waned over the years. In the 1990s heyday of the Brady Bill and assault weapons ban, she was a vocal advocate, and made the establishment of a national gun registry a major proposal in her 2000 bid for Senate in New York. In the 2000s, like fellow Democrats from John Kerry to Howard Dean, she moderated her position, reflecting the then-conventional wisdom that the party needed to appeal to rural white voters in the South to win again.
And as the issue regained national salience after the Sandy Hook massacre, Clinton has, like most members of her party, rediscovered her passion for gun control.
Clinton in the '90s: a strong gun control advocate
In her 1996 book It Takes a Village, she quotes a letter a 9-year-old boy in New Orleans sent to President Clinton in 1994, pleading, "I want you to stop the killing in the city. People is dead and I think that somebody might kill me. So would you please stop the people from deading. I'm asking you nicely to stop it. I know you can do it. Do it. I know you could." The boy was shot dead nine days later.
This is the context in which Clinton issues her defense of the Brady Bill and assault weapons ban:
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