My Wednesday column begins like so:
As evidenced by my post on Monday about pursuing gun control legislation at the state level due to the ineffectual and barely-there efforts of the congressional Democrats, I’ve been thinking about various ways to roll back the proliferation of guns and the gun culture without necessarily stepping all over the pro-gun interpretation of the Second Amendment.
And then the following news item hit the blogs and sparked another idea. Mark Kelly, the astronaut husband of Gabrielle Giffords, attempted to purchase some assault weapons as a means of illustrating the pathetic background check system that’s currently in place. After purchasing the weapons, Kelly’s plan was to turn over the weapons to the authorities.
But then, Diamondback Police Supply, the gun dealership that Kelly visited to purchase a Sig Sauer M400 rifle (actual manufacturer slogan: “Built for Those Who Require No Introduction”) has decided that Kelly doesn’t actually have a constitutional right to own one and subsequently canceled the sale.
Weird, isn’t it? Kelly, an astronaut and national hero, isn’t allowed to buy a Sig Sauer, but any pot-bellied hoople with a plastic, penisless novelty scrotum on the back of his truck and a camouflage trucker cap mounted atop his proto-hominid skull can buy as many as he wants. They’re outright preventing Kelly from exercising his constitutional right to bear arms — which the NRA tells me is absolute, especially for “good guys” such as astronauts — because they’d like to block him from making an anti-gun statement (exercising his First Amendment right).
So clearly it’s okay to prevent legitimate gun customers from buying weapons… just because. The Second Amendment be damned if a gun dealer, you know, doesn’t feel like selling a gun.
Interesting. This is a huge loophole. The right to bear arms — maybe. [continue reading here]