Texas AG to Obama: I’ll sue if U.N. Arms Treaty is ratified

Beware the gun tax

By: John Hayward | April 2nd, 2013 at 11:08 AM

David Addington at the Heritage Foundation reports on a little something-something slipped into the rough beast of gun control laws slouching toward the Senate to be born, courtesy of majority leader Harry Reid:

Title I of the Reid gun control bill purports to “fix gun checks.” The proposed “fix” in section 122 of S. 649 is to take away an individual’s right to sell or give away a firearm to another individual unless, in most cases, the individual (1) uses a licensed importer, dealer, or manufacturer to make the transfer of the firearm and (2) pays a fee to that importer, dealer, or manufacturer to make the transfer.

The individual transferring the firearm is not actually receiving a service; the federal government is receiving the service. The service the government gets is a background check on the intended recipient of the firearm, because the law requires the importer, dealer, or manufacturer to run the recipient through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.

Forcing the individual to pay for the government-mandated service, which is in fact a service to the government, is in essence a federal tax on the individual. And the amount the individual pays as a fee is not limited by the legislation; section 122(a)(4) of the Reid bill enacts a new section 922(t)(4)(B)(i) of title 18 of the U.S. Code to grant to Attorney General Eric Holder the power to set the maximum fee by regulation.

That sounds great! I was just thinking that what this country really needs is Eric Holder controlling more of our lives.

Besides the obvious ramifications for gun control, this is a prime example of all the little back doors installed in our liberty by Big Government. Countless taxes are disguised as “fees” and “penalties.” When ObamaCare reached the Supreme Court, we learned just how quickly the political class was willing to admit they’re all taxes, no matter what rhetorical sleight-of-hand is used to slip them past voters. Remember when President Obama literally laughed out loud at the idea his health-care plan would impose taxes on the middle class? On Day One of that bizarre Supreme Court hearing, he stopped laughing.

No doubt Reid, Holder, and their allies would respond to Addington’s criticism by insisting that it’s the American people receiving this vital universal background check “service,” not the federal bureaucracy. The government’s interests are always camouflaged as popular interest, with bureaucrats serving as the avatars of popular will.

Once Harry Reid’s background check tax is in place, it could easily become a clamp for choking off gun rights, by simply cranking the fee up high enough. At some point, this would prompt dramatically increased interest in black-market gun transfers, which would tend to defeat the entire purpose of universal background checks – which won’t be much of an impediment to criminals anyway, although supporters of the idea hope it will dissuade the “straw purchasers” who buy weapons legally and funnel them to the underworld.

Placing a stiff “fee” on a background check system for even the most casual transfer of firearms would provide a monetary incentive for people to avoid using the system, measured against the risk of getting arrested for violating the law. If the background check system is truly a universal public interest, shouldn’t it be financed out of general taxation and provided “free” to those who need it, just like every other socialized necessity? We hear a lot about how public subsidies are necessary to guarantee “access” to our “rights.” For example, it has become received wisdom on the Left that if people are obliged to pay for their own birth control, they are being denied “access” to it. Why shouldn’t that logic apply to gun rights, which really are explicitly spelled out in the Bill of Rights? If we’re not going to subsidize legal gun purchases under this principle of “access,” we should at least provide those universal background checks for “free.”

It’s hard to resolve a tax on the purchase or transfer of all firearms with the concept of a “right to keep and bear arms that shall not be infringed.” Taxing the exercise of a right is a clear infringement upon it, as any discussion of poll taxes would swiftly make clear. In fact, Eric Holder’s Justice Department has a habit of arguing that even minor incidental expenses incurred in the course of obtaining voter identification, such as the cost of traveling to an election office to pick up a free ID card, are unacceptable infringements upon voting rights. Attorney General Holder himself has not been shy about denouncing these expenses as a racist conspiracy to suppress the minority vote. Wouldn’t Harry Reid’s gun tax be a comparable conspiracy to suppress the exercise of Second Amendment rights by law-abiding minority gun buyers?

Or should we stop asking such impertinent questions, and accept the judgment of politicians and government officials about just how alienable our inalienable rights must become, on a case-by-case basis?

UN adopts landmark treaty to regulate multibillion-dollar global arms trade

UNITED NATIONS — The U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly approved the first international treaty regulating the multibillion-dollar global arms trade Tuesday, after a more than decade-long campaign to keep weapons from falling into the hands of terrorists, warlords, organized crime figures and human rights violators.

Loud cheers erupted in the assembly chamber as the electronic board flashed the final vote: 154 in favor, 3 against and 23 abstentions.

City enforcers increasingly under attack by the street vendors they have long harassed.

“This is a victory for the world’s people,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said. “The Arms Trade Treaty will make it more difficult for deadly weapons to be diverted into the illicit market. ... It will be a powerful new tool in our efforts to prevent grave human rights abuses or violations of international humanitarian law.”

The United States, the world’s biggest arms exporter, voted yes.

Iran, North Korea and Syria — all facing arms embargoes — cast the only no votes. They argued, among other things, that the agreement favors major arms suppliers like the U.S. over importers that need weapons for self-defense.

Russia and China, which are also major arms exporters, abstained along with India and Indonesia, while nuclear-armed Pakistan voted in favor. Many Arab countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Qatar, abstained, while Lebanon voted yes.

Never before has there been a treaty regulating the global arms trade, which is estimated to be worth $60 billion today and which Amnesty International predicts will exceed $100 billion in the next four years.

“Today’s victory shows that ordinary people who care about protecting human rights can fight back to stop the gun lobby dead in its tracks, helping to save countless lives,” said Frank Jannuzi, deputy executive director of Amnesty International USA.

“The voices of reason triumphed over skeptics, treaty opponents and dealers in death to establish a revolutionary treaty that constitutes a major step toward keeping assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons out of the hands of despots and warlords who use them to kill and maim civilians, recruit child soldiers and commit other serious abuses.”

What impact the treaty will actually have remains to be seen. It will take effect 90 days after 50 countries ratify it, and a lot will depend on which ones ratify and which ones don’t, and how stringently it is implemented.

As for its chances of being ratified by the U.S., the powerful National Rifle Association has vehemently opposed it, and it is likely to face stiff resistance from conservatives in the Senate, where it needs two-thirds to win ratification.

Secretary of State John Kerry called it a “strong, effective and implementable” treaty and stressed that it applies only to international deals and “reaffirms the sovereign right of any state to regulate arms within its territory.”

The treaty prohibits countries that ratify it from exporting conventional weapons if they violate arms embargoes, or if they promote acts of genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes, or if they could be used in attacks against civilians or schools and hospitals.

CONTINUE HERE

Firearms Risk Protection Act Could Stick Gun Owners With $10,000 Fine

While the Socialists are finally coming out about the reality of the costs that Obamacare will bring and the utter monstrosity it is, others of the Socialist Democrat Party are pushing for gun owners to be forced to purchase liability insurance for gun owners. Those that don’t could face fines of $10,000. We told you that when you open the floodgates of allowing the Federal government to mandate purchasing a product there would be more to come. Maloneycare is just another in a long line of legislation that will be coming down the pipe.

Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) introduced her bill, H.R. 1369, along with eight other Socialists in the Democrat Party saying it would be “the first bill to require liability insurance of gun buyers nationwide.”

However, this isn’t just about citizens who wish to purchase a firearm. It’s about those of us who already own them. Maloney and her comrades want to impose a $10,000 fine if you don’t purchase liability insurance.

The bill reads:

“It shall be unlawful for a person who owns a firearm purchased on or after the effective date of this subsection not to be covered by a qualified liability insurance policy.”

It also makes it a Federal crime (another unlawful law) to sell one of your firearms to anyone without liability insurance.

In introducing her legislation, Maloney said, “For too long, gun victims and society at large have borne the brunt of the costs of gun violence. My bill would change that by shifting some of that cost back onto those who own the weapons.”

This is an epic fail on Maloney’s part. This is a flat out lie. Society has not “borne the brunt of the costs of gun violence.” The only violence comes from humans and that violence comes in many forms. Guns don’t get up and do anyone any harm at any time and her bill doesn’t change anything. Society has not borne the brunt of the costs in this matter and putting this legislation in place will not change that, seeing that the majority of gun violence comes from criminals in the inner cities who will not be purchasing this insurance, but will ultimately bear the cost of their own violence and that will be in their death.

What this bill is all about is a sneak attack to have ground to come and remove your guns from your possession because you didn’t purchase liability insurance. OK, yeah there’s money involved too. I actually wouldn’t be surprised if insurance companies were in on this legislation simply because they would receive a bit more business from it. It’s very similar to the part they played in Obamacare.

With many states requiring drivers to carry auto insurance, Maloney argues that, “We have a long history of requiring insurance for high-risk products — and no one disputes that guns are dangerous.”

“While many individual states are debating this issue now, it makes more sense for Congress to establish a national requirement to allow the insurance markets to begin to price the risks involved consistently nationwide,” she said.

Here’s the problem. Liberals think because something has made a precedent, that it then becomes justified. I have a question for those that buy into the precedent argument, where in the U.S. Constitution does the Federal government have the authority to institute such measures? This is not an issue about “long history.” It’s an issue of authority. If you are one that believes they are the same and that the Federal government possesses this authority to demand citizens purchase insurance, be it health or liability, I suggest you educate yourself on the fetters that are to bind the Federal government in these areas here. After all, this legislation is completely unconstitutional.

Gun Owners of America President Larry Pratt told Freedom Outpost, “Mrs. Maloney’s proposal makes one wonder if she has an interest in the liability insurance industry.”

“We ought to require liability insurance of politicians,” Pratt said. “This is simply a measure that she has proposed that if it were law, would make it more difficult for people to own guns, particularly poor people. I thought Democrats were the champions of poor people. This is actually something that targets those that live in neighborhoods where they most need a gun, yet would make sure that the gun was priced out of reach.”

When I mentioned that this could be combined with the proposed “sin tax” on firearms that would escalate the prices even more on firearms and intrude upon one’s ability to even purchase a firearm to exercise their Second Amendment rights, Pratt added, “What Mrs. Maloney is not wanting to recognize is that the Clinton Justice Department published a study, which they had commissioned by some academics, has found that firearms are used some 4,000 plus times a day in self defense and what she is suggesting is, because of her tax and fewer people being able to afford a gun that crime would actually go up. The unintended consequences of gun control would be seen once again, even as it was seen in the District of Columbia, where they had a gun ban and one of the highest murder rates in the country. That murder rate has now declined since they got rid of their gun ban.”

“So Mrs. Maloney is going precisely in the wrong direction,” Pratt concluded.

Maloney’s co-sponsors on the bill include the likes of Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison, D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, Massachusetts Rep. Michael Capuano, Virginia Rep. Jim Moran, Illinois Rep. Bobby Rush, Massachusetts Rep. Nikki Tsongas, Massachusetts Rep. Stephen Lynch and Oregon Rep. Earl Blumenauer.

So let your voice be heard on this matter. Yes I know they are Socialists and won’t listen, but we can annoy them by pushing back against them. Click on their names to reach their contact page.

Comment by Gordon Ray Kissinger on April 3, 2013 at 7:38pm: Beware the gun tax

By: John Hayward | April 2nd, 2013 at 11:08 AM

David Addington at the Heritage Foundation reports on a little something-something slipped into the rough beast of gun control laws slouching toward the Senate to be born, courtesy of majority leader Harry Reid:

Title I of the Reid gun control bill purports to “fix gun checks.” The proposed “fix” in section 122 of S. 649 is to take away an individual’s right to sell or give away a firearm to another individual unless, in most cases, the individual (1) uses a licensed importer, dealer, or manufacturer to make the transfer of the firearm and (2) pays a fee to that importer, dealer, or manufacturer to make the transfer.

The individual transferring the firearm is not actually receiving a service; the federal government is receiving the service. The service the government gets is a background check on the intended recipient of the firearm, because the law requires the importer, dealer, or manufacturer to run the recipient through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.

Forcing the individual to pay for the government-mandated service, which is in fact a service to the government, is in essence a federal tax on the individual. And the amount the individual pays as a fee is not limited by the legislation; section 122(a)(4) of the Reid bill enacts a new section 922(t)(4)(B)(i) of title 18 of the U.S. Code to grant to Attorney General Eric Holder the power to set the maximum fee by regulation.

That sounds great! I was just thinking that what this country really needs is Eric Holder controlling more of our lives.

Besides the obvious ramifications for gun control, this is a prime example of all the little back doors installed in our liberty by Big Government. Countless taxes are disguised as “fees” and “penalties.” When ObamaCare reached the Supreme Court, we learned just how quickly the political class was willing to admit they’re all taxes, no matter what rhetorical sleight-of-hand is used to slip them past voters. Remember when President Obama literally laughed out loud at the idea his health-care plan would impose taxes on the middle class? On Day One of that bizarre Supreme Court hearing, he stopped laughing.

No doubt Reid, Holder, and their allies would respond to Addington’s criticism by insisting that it’s the American people receiving this vital universal background check “service,” not the federal bureaucracy. The government’s interests are always camouflaged as popular interest, with bureaucrats serving as the avatars of popular will.

Once Harry Reid’s background check tax is in place, it could easily become a clamp for choking off gun rights, by simply cranking the fee up high enough. At some point, this would prompt dramatically increased interest in black-market gun transfers, which would tend to defeat the entire purpose of universal background checks – which won’t be much of an impediment to criminals anyway, although supporters of the idea hope it will dissuade the “straw purchasers” who buy weapons legally and funnel them to the underworld.

Placing a stiff “fee” on a background check system for even the most casual transfer of firearms would provide a monetary incentive for people to avoid using the system, measured against the risk of getting arrested for violating the law. If the background check system is truly a universal public interest, shouldn’t it be financed out of general taxation and provided “free” to those who need it, just like every other socialized necessity? We hear a lot about how public subsidies are necessary to guarantee “access” to our “rights.” For example, it has become received wisdom on the Left that if people are obliged to pay for their own birth control, they are being denied “access” to it. Why shouldn’t that logic apply to gun rights, which really are explicitly spelled out in the Bill of Rights? If we’re not going to subsidize legal gun purchases under this principle of “access,” we should at least provide those universal background checks for “free.”

It’s hard to resolve a tax on the purchase or transfer of all firearms with the concept of a “right to keep and bear arms that shall not be infringed.” Taxing the exercise of a right is a clear infringement upon it, as any discussion of poll taxes would swiftly make clear. In fact, Eric Holder’s Justice Department has a habit of arguing that even minor incidental expenses incurred in the course of obtaining voter identification, such as the cost of traveling to an election office to pick up a free ID card, are unacceptable infringements upon voting rights. Attorney General Holder himself has not been shy about denouncing these expenses as a racist conspiracy to suppress the minority vote. Wouldn’t Harry Reid’s gun tax be a comparable conspiracy to suppress the exercise of Second Amendment rights by law-abiding minority gun buyers?

Or should we stop asking such impertinent questions, and accept the judgment of politicians and government officials about just how alienable our inalienable rights must become, on a case-by-case basis?

http://www.redstate.com/2013/04/02/beware-the-gun-tax/

Comment by Gordon Ray Kissinger on April 3, 2013 at 5:04am: UN adopts landmark treaty to regulate multibillion-dollar global arms trade

UNITED NATIONS — The U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly approved the first international treaty regulating the multibillion-dollar global arms trade Tuesday, after a more than decade-long campaign to keep weapons from falling into the hands of terrorists, warlords, organized crime figures and human rights violators.

Loud cheers erupted in the assembly chamber as the electronic board flashed the final vote: 154 in favor, 3 against and 23 abstentions.

City enforcers increasingly under attack by the street vendors they have long harassed.

“This is a victory for the world’s people,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said. “The Arms Trade Treaty will make it more difficult for deadly weapons to be diverted into the illicit market. ... It will be a powerful new tool in our efforts to prevent grave human rights abuses or violations of international humanitarian law.”

The United States, the world’s biggest arms exporter, voted yes.

Iran, North Korea and Syria — all facing arms embargoes — cast the only no votes. They argued, among other things, that the agreement favors major arms suppliers like the U.S. over importers that need weapons for self-defense.

Russia and China, which are also major arms exporters, abstained along with India and Indonesia, while nuclear-armed Pakistan voted in favor. Many Arab countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Qatar, abstained, while Lebanon voted yes.

Never before has there been a treaty regulating the global arms trade, which is estimated to be worth $60 billion today and which Amnesty International predicts will exceed $100 billion in the next four years.

“Today’s victory shows that ordinary people who care about protecting human rights can fight back to stop the gun lobby dead in its tracks, helping to save countless lives,” said Frank Jannuzi, deputy executive director of Amnesty International USA.

“The voices of reason triumphed over skeptics, treaty opponents and dealers in death to establish a revolutionary treaty that constitutes a major step toward keeping assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons out of the hands of despots and warlords who use them to kill and maim civilians, recruit child soldiers and commit other serious abuses.”

What impact the treaty will actually have remains to be seen. It will take effect 90 days after 50 countries ratify it, and a lot will depend on which ones ratify and which ones don’t, and how stringently it is implemented.

As for its chances of being ratified by the U.S., the powerful National Rifle Association has vehemently opposed it, and it is likely to face stiff resistance from conservatives in the Senate, where it needs two-thirds to win ratification.

Secretary of State John Kerry called it a “strong, effective and implementable” treaty and stressed that it applies only to international deals and “reaffirms the sovereign right of any state to regulate arms within its territory.”

The treaty prohibits countries that ratify it from exporting conventional weapons if they violate arms embargoes, or if they promote acts of genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes, or if they could be used in attacks against civilians or schools and hospitals.

CONTINUE HERE

Comment by Gordon Ray Kissinger on April 3, 2013 at 4:54am: Firearms Risk Protection Act Could Stick Gun Owners With $10,000 Fine

While the Socialists are finally coming out about the reality of the costs that Obamacare will bring and the utter monstrosity it is, others of the Socialist Democrat Party are pushing for gun owners to be forced to purchase liability insurance for gun owners. Those that don’t could face fines of $10,000. We told you that when you open the floodgates of allowing the Federal government to mandate purchasing a product there would be more to come. Maloneycare is just another in a long line of legislation that will be coming down the pipe.

Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) introduced her bill, H.R. 1369, along with eight other Socialists in the Democrat Party saying it would be “the first bill to require liability insurance of gun buyers nationwide.”

However, this isn’t just about citizens who wish to purchase a firearm. It’s about those of us who already own them. Maloney and her comrades want to impose a $10,000 fine if you don’t purchase liability insurance.

The bill reads:

“It shall be unlawful for a person who owns a firearm purchased on or after the effective date of this subsection not to be covered by a qualified liability insurance policy.”

It also makes it a Federal crime (another unlawful law) to sell one of your firearms to anyone without liability insurance.

In introducing her legislation, Maloney said, “For too long, gun victims and society at large have borne the brunt of the costs of gun violence. My bill would change that by shifting some of that cost back onto those who own the weapons.”

This is an epic fail on Maloney’s part. This is a flat out lie. Society has not “borne the brunt of the costs of gun violence.” The only violence comes from humans and that violence comes in many forms. Guns don’t get up and do anyone any harm at any time and her bill doesn’t change anything. Society has not borne the brunt of the costs in this matter and putting this legislation in place will not change that, seeing that the majority of gun violence comes from criminals in the inner cities who will not be purchasing this insurance, but will ultimately bear the cost of their own violence and that will be in their death.

What this bill is all about is a sneak attack to have ground to come and remove your guns from your possession because you didn’t purchase liability insurance. OK, yeah there’s money involved too. I actually wouldn’t be surprised if insurance companies were in on this legislation simply because they would receive a bit more business from it. It’s very similar to the part they played in Obamacare.

With many states requiring drivers to carry auto insurance, Maloney argues that, “We have a long history of requiring insurance for high-risk products — and no one disputes that guns are dangerous.”

“While many individual states are debating this issue now, it makes more sense for Congress to establish a national requirement to allow the insurance markets to begin to price the risks involved consistently nationwide,” she said.

Here’s the problem. Liberals think because something has made a precedent, that it then becomes justified. I have a question for those that buy into the precedent argument, where in the U.S. Constitution does the Federal government have the authority to institute such measures? This is not an issue about “long history.” It’s an issue of authority. If you are one that believes they are the same and that the Federal government possesses this authority to demand citizens purchase insurance, be it health or liability, I suggest you educate yourself on the fetters that are to bind the Federal government in these areas here. After all, this legislation is completely unconstitutional.

Gun Owners of America President Larry Pratt told Freedom Outpost, “Mrs. Maloney’s proposal makes one wonder if she has an interest in the liability insurance industry.”

“We ought to require liability insurance of politicians,” Pratt said. “This is simply a measure that she has proposed that if it were law, would make it more difficult for people to own guns, particularly poor people. I thought Democrats were the champions of poor people. This is actually something that targets those that live in neighborhoods where they most need a gun, yet would make sure that the gun was priced out of reach.”

When I mentioned that this could be combined with the proposed “sin tax” on firearms that would escalate the prices even more on firearms and intrude upon one’s ability to even purchase a firearm to exercise their Second Amendment rights, Pratt added, “What Mrs. Maloney is not wanting to recognize is that the Clinton Justice Department published a study, which they had commissioned by some academics, has found that firearms are used some 4,000 plus times a day in self defense and what she is suggesting is, because of her tax and fewer people being able to afford a gun that crime would actually go up. The unintended consequences of gun control would be seen once again, even as it was seen in the District of Columbia, where they had a gun ban and one of the highest murder rates in the country. That murder rate has now declined since they got rid of their gun ban.”

“So Mrs. Maloney is going precisely in the wrong direction,” Pratt concluded.

Maloney’s co-sponsors on the bill include the likes of Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison, D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, Massachusetts Rep. Michael Capuano, Virginia Rep. Jim Moran, Illinois Rep. Bobby Rush, Massachusetts Rep. Nikki Tsongas, Massachusetts Rep. Stephen Lynch and Oregon Rep. Earl Blumenauer.

So let your voice be heard on this matter. Yes I know they are Socialists and won’t listen, but we can annoy them by pushing back against them. Click on their names to reach their contact page.

Carolyn Maloney

Keith Ellison

Eleanor Norton

Michael Capuano

Jim Moran

Bobby Rush

Niki Tsongas

Stephen Lynch

Earl Blumenauer

Read more: http://freedomoutpost.com/2013/04/firearms-risk-protection-act-will...

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Beware the gun tax

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