A new ban on assault-style weapons was part of Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s platform.
Fear of such a ban sent gun sales skyrocketing and the propaganda machine of the giant National Rife Association went into overdrive flooding its membership is "legislative alerts" about such a ban.
That was then, this is now.
Obama and the Democrats appear to have lost all interest in a ban on assault weapons or any other legislation cleaning up loopholes in America’s gun laws even though killings are on the rise and gun violence continues to escalate around the country.
White House officials admit support for a new ban isn’t there and the President isn’t willing to take on another losing battle with Congress.
Although information on banning assault style weapons remains on the White House web site, sources within the Democratic party say the issue is dead and unlikely to be revived in the near future.
"It’s over," a Democrat strategist admits. "The gun nuts have won…again."
On the morning of April 4, Richard Poplawski had a quarrel with his mother. It was over a dog urinating on a carpet. Mom called the police to have her 22-year-old son evicted from her house, a brick ranch with a dirty aluminum awning in the Stanton Heights neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Two officers responded to the call, figuring it was a typical domestic dispute. Margaret Poplawski greeted them by saying, "Come and take his ass." But the younger Poplawski, who had been laid off from his job in a glass factory recently, had other plans. He went to a private arms cache in the house, retrieved his guns and strapped on a Kevlar bulletproof vest.
Poplawski shot officer Paul J. Sciullo II, 37, inside the house and hit 29-year-old Stephen Mayhle on the stoop. Both men fell dead. Poplawski calmly stood in the doorway and fired two or three more bullets into Mayhle’s body, according to a police affidavit from a witness. Then he retreated into the house and fired hundreds of rounds, using an AK-47 assault rifle and other weapons to fend off a police SWAT team for four hours. He killed one other cop, 41-year-old Eric Kelly, and wounded yet another.
It was the deadliest day in the history of the Steel City’s police department. When police finally apprehended and questioned Poplawski, he was without remorse. "He said he wishes he could have killed more Pittsburgh police officers," says a cop who was on the scene but asked not to be identified talking about an ongoing case. (Poplawski’s lawyer did not respond to multiple requests for comment last week.)
There was a time when a creep like Poplawski would have become a potent symbol in the debate over gun control. He wasn’t your run-of-the-mill malcontent. A white supremacist, he frequented the chat rooms of racist Web sites, where he posted screeds about a "Zionist occupation" bringing the country to economic ruin. But Keith Savage, manager of the Braverman Arms Co., where Poplawski got many of his guns (but not the AK-47, Savage claims), says nothing seemed amiss when he filled out Form 4473—the standard questionnaire for federally required background checks. The gun-shop staff had no way of knowing, for instance, about Poplawski’s January 2005 discharge from the Marines for what Lt. Josh Diddams, a U.S. Marine Corps spokesman, tells NEWSWEEK was a "psychological disorder" (he had assaulted his drill sergeant during basic training, says Poplawski’s mother). They probably also didn’t know that Poplawski’s former girlfriend had gotten a restraining order against him, later in 2005, after he grabbed her by the hair and threatened to kill her.
In the past, national political leaders might have raised troubling questions about how such an unstable character could obtain easy access to high-powered weapons. They might have been even more motivated given that Poplawski’s cop-killing spree was part of a near epidemic of mass homicides that have left 58 people dead over the past month. Or given that Mexico’s insanely violent drug cartels are arming themselves with high-powered assault weapons purchased at U.S. gun stores and later smuggled south of the border. Yet many past champions of stricter gun-control measures are silent. These include top Obama White House officials who have squelched any talk within the administration about pushing further gun-control measures."It’s weird," says Peter Hamm, the communications director for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. "When you see people like [Attorney General] Eric Holder or Hillary Clinton or [White House chief of staff] Rahm Emanuel become muted on this issue, you feel like you want to call up a friend and say, ‘What’s up?’ "
Running for president in last year’s Democratic primaries, Barack Obama promised to restore a federal ban on certain semiautomatic assault guns—a position that’s still on the White House Web site. The ban was originally passed by the Democratic-controlled Congress in 1994 and lapsed five years ago. In recent years the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has also lifted virtually all restrictions on imports of foreign-made assault weapons, permitting a flood of cheap Romanian, Bulgarian and other Eastern European AK-47s to enter the country, according to gun-control groups. "There’s been an absolute deluge of these weapons," says Kristen Rand of the Violence Policy Center.
But Obama and top White House aides have all but abandoned the issue.
2 thoughts on “Obama abandons assault weapons ban”
ny dentists : Dentists in New York, NY, See Reviews and Book Online Instantly. All appointment times are guaranteed by our dentists and doctors.
Hi barak,
I believe one time you revealed you are Jewish. I’m 64, my wife is ten years older than myself, us being married 43 years this August.
My wife is a German, many years an American citizen with half Jewish roots who as a child witnessed the banker, butcher and baker the dragged off behind either SS or Gestapo operatives. Some were dragged literally by a rope tied to their ankles behind a vehicle over cobblestone streets; many picked up in the dead of night; ie, under the policy of “Nacht und Nebel”…into the night and fog never to be seen again!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nacht_und_Nebel
Other than shotguns and possibly a few hunting rifles and handguns here and there the German people had no defense against such government overreaching which is a gross understatement based on historical outcomes.
So until you witness close family and friends affected directly by government enfranchised thugs many of which were liberated from German prisons in order to staff the SS and its’ various service branches one should not be all too eager to condemn our good citizens as being gun nuts. It might just take a bunch of well-armed “nuts” still with a vestige of patriotism in their spirits to stop such a push by our now criminally inspired government.
She only survived because her father was a Colonel in the German Army performing as a dentist his specialty maxillo-facialary surgery with her as a child living with her gentile side of the family; ie., her father. Her Jewish mother died of cancer in 1941, she age 7.
Based on the activities of Blackwater Security et. al. private security firms, along with my knowledge of how Delta Force is trained concerning the suppression of “urban unrest”, our government will be operating with a similar Gestapo/SS playbook. I’m not joking either…!
Carl Nemo **==
Might as well ban assault box cutters. 19 of ’em were able to take out nearly 3,000 people and resulted in another 100,000+ dead, 4 million displaced, 3,000 some odd tortured and an ongoing regional war in the Middle East.
Talk about yer weapon of mass distraction, I mean destruction. Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.
This isn’t about unregistered arsenals at all, but the constitutionally protected inalienable right for citizens to own guns. To protect ourselves and our families and our property not only from criminals, but from a tyrannical government.
If you wish not to own firearms then that is your choice. But criminals, by definition, do not follow our laws, so simply outlawing guns for those that do follow our laws won’t do anything to stop gun crime.
I have no problem with any Americans that have a desire to be victims, it’s just not my gig.
In fact some of the cities with the strictest gun laws coincidentally have the highest crime rates. Go figure. It appears that the local gangbangers don’t have the patience to wait the three days.
“Laws that forbid the carrying of arms… disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes… Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.” – Thomas Jefferson
As for the NRA – I don’t belong and I wouldn’t even consider it. Actually, one should check out Jews for the Preservation of Firearm Ownership. They may know a little something about what happens when a government disarms a population.
I would also recommend checking out HR 17: Citizens’ Self Defense Act of 2009 and specifically some of the statistical examples in that bill.
Such as…
Section 2(b)”Of the 2,400,000 self-defense cases, more than 192,000 are by women defending themselves against sexual abuse.”
Section 2(c)”Of the 2,400,000 times citizens use their guns to defend themselves every year, 92 percent merely brandish their gun or fire a warning shot to scare off their attackers. Less than 8 percent of the time, does a citizen kill or wound his or her attacker.”
I despise the power of the NRA. However, I am smart enough to know that the NRA will never be beaten in obscurity by any party or group.
I cannot understand the the mentality of “GUN NUTS” no matter how hard I try. There is no rational reason for anyone owning an unregistered arsonal period! Gun collectors (I do know a few) are proud of their collections… their collections are valuable and insured the same as an art collection. Those of you who take umbrage under the second amendment, using it as an excuse for ILLEGAL gun ownership will always bring to my mind the term “armed and dangerous”
Wow! All it takes is someone saying they plan to take your penis extensions away and all you gun crazies come running out of the woodwork like termites fleeing a fire.
Why, if you love guns so much (and please don’t give me that second amendment bull about right to bear arms, if you read it it says something about a well-armed militia, and I don’t see you running to join up) why not take a ride to Afghanistan and shoot some Talibanners, maybe hunt Ossama bin Laden too?
Go now, the Army needs more crazies with auto and sniper weapons. Park a Tank in your front yard so the little woman can defend hearth and home. The cops who went on that call were experienced, professionals, all with weapons and the knowledge of how to use them. It did them no good at all. Do you all really believe that having a gun or guns in your home will allow you more protection?
If you do, I have a lovely bridge in NYC for y’all to buy and I will give you a hell of a discount.
One of those liberal nanny state pricks
curious. a right wing nut goes off the deep end having bought into the propaganda, kills a bunch of cops over urine, and justified it with his “government is evil” ideology.
In rebuttal, the thread is filled by posters who agree, and post that same ideology to discredit gun regulations.
Thank God Iraq didn’t have gun control, so that when foreign nations took over their government the peoples could form an insurgency, and fight back for their country against those who declared Marshal law. granted, the surge worked, and put down this well armed insurgency, but what the hell, that’s Iraq, us john wayne types would have defeated the American military, and coalition of the willing. right?
<--slowly shakes head. the things that are pawned off as intellect these days. Recall Robert Bork? the one the leftist liberals "borked" his supreme court nomination because he was far too right wing conservative constitutionalist? You know, the staunch constitutionalist the conservatives said would restore DC to a constitutional government? ahem...Bork is well on record on the 2nd amendment. His conservative opinion is...you only have the right to own a fire arm IF you are part of a well regulated malitia, otherwise, you do not have the right to keep and bear arms personally. Funny, the NRA didn't have a problem with that. Canada has more guns per capita than America, and yet doesn't have any where near the violent crime this nation is subjected to daily. Guns are not the problem. Ideology is the problem, and on this the far left, and far right are in solidarity. though this issue is not limited to just this. several years ago Seattle was trashed when the WTO came to town. what MSM failed to cover is where all those anarchist came from. Back in the day, local leftist radicals used to use the city of Eugene Oregon for practice just before going national with a protest. this allowed them to see how police would react under different situations. Just before the Seattle event, the U of O invited the world anarchists to hold their yearly convention here. Gosh, downtown Eugene ended up being trashed in protest, no one saw that happening. Buses were than chartered here, and these anarachist from around the world were bused to Seattle just in time for the WTO. Seattle burns, news at 11. during this time 2 other issues arose that dovetails...a local car dealership was fire bombed, and over in felony flats a leftist liberal cabal was busted with a garage full of explosives, enough to blow up half the city. Ted kazinski had nothing on them. the point. what is this whacked leftist ideology that provokes them to stock pile bombs? government is evil, and gonna get us. look how they illegally wire tap our phones, and spy on us via the FBI, etc etc etc. golly, Bush is going to declare Marshal law, halliburton is building concentration camps in America!!! in other words, when you listen to the ideology of the far left, you start hearing almost verbatim Tim Mcveigh. The difference being, the left prefers bombs, the right loves their guns. Id say most of the deaths in this country at the hand of a gun, has more to do with a double standard of justice in America, and the dysfunctional tyranny thereof, than the 2nd amendment. as for regulation, back ground checks, etc? what did Reagan preach? trust, but verify.
Comments are closed.