By Warner Todd Huston ——Bio and Archives--July 19, 2015
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For more than a year, we and fellow religious leaders across the nation have worked to persuade President Obama to use what we believe is the most powerful tool government has in this area: its purchasing power. The federal government is the nation’s top gun buyer. It purchases more than a quarter of the guns and ammunition sold legally in the United States. State and local law enforcement agencies also purchase a large share. Major gun manufacturers depend on these taxpayer-funded purchases. For the government to keep buying guns from these companies--purchases meant to ensure public safety--without making demands for change is to squander its leverage.
"[The Pentagon] should require all bidders to provide detailed information about their gun safety technologies and distribution practices in the civilian market."This is meaningless gobbledygook. What the heck would a gun buyer care about Colt's, Ruger's, Glock's or any other gun maker's "distribution practices"? It would just be another set of requirements for a gun maker to print up all this pointless stuff to include in packaging that a gun buyer would ignore. But the group saved its most unconstitutional proposal for last.
Fourth, develop a set of metrics for measuring manufacturers’ performance. We might measure, for instance, the number of a manufacturer’s guns found at crime scenes, as a percentage of their overall sales.So, because of what people do with a gun, that would be enough for the government to take some sort of (undefined) action to sanction the company? How many Fords are used as getaway cars for bank robberies? Should we sanction Ford? How many Schwinn bikes are used unsafely by kids who get hurt each year? Should we sanction Schwinn? How many people get ill each year by unsafely combining alcohol with energy drinks? Do we sanction Red Bull for what its customers do? How many…. well, we could go on forever with the idiotic "metrics" of blaming a manufacturer for what its customers do. And we've already had court case after court case maintaining that manufacturers aren't responsible for what customers do with their products. Regardless, this whole campaign is gun banning by proxy. It is a stealth way to force the firearm industry to bend over for the gun banners' ideas quite against good capitalist practices and any observance of our Second Amendment rights. Further, using government as a sledgehammer to force the "social change" ideas of a minority is also not the way America works. But in the end, I do agree that government should stop buying so many guns and so much ammo. Outside of the military, the federal government does not need all this firepower. Lastly, let’s turn the tables on these buttinski “ministers.” They make a living off the First Amendment, right? Let’s say that government should force the media to say what it wants the media to say because the government buys a lot of newspapers, or subscribes to a lot of cable TV, or because the government has some level of control over the Internet. Would these ministers think it is a great idea for the media to be fully controlled by the federal government just because they buy a lot of media products? My guess would be no. They likely feel that the government should be hands off our freedom of speech. But note that while they want their favorite part of the Constitution to be sacrosanct, of the part they don’t like they have no problem oppressing. Funny how that works with liberals.
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Warner Todd Huston’s thoughtful commentary, sometimes irreverent often historically based, is featured on many websites such as Breitbart.com, among many, many others. He has also written for several history magazines, has appeared on numerous TV and radio shows.
He is also the owner and operator of Publius’ Forum.