Former President Barack Obama (D) had a lot to say about our Second Amendment rights in a recent interview with CBS, where the headline read, “Barack Obama says public attitudes around gun rights have to be reshaped.”
“I think somehow, and there are a lot of historical reasons for this; gun ownership in this country became an ideological issue and a partisan issue in ways that it shouldn’t be. It has become sort of a proxy for arguments about our culture wars,” said Obama in the interview.
It’s curious, if not troubling, that a former president would state that a constitutionally protected right is “ideological” and “partisan,” but he wasn’t done.
“Instead of just taking a very practical approach like we do, let’s say, for example, with car safety, where we say all right we got a bunch of accidents, let’s have seat belts; let’s make cars safer; let’s engineer the roads so that we prevent them,” said Obama.
The former president also emphasized that these motor vehicle efforts are “pragmatic.”
Once again, Obama conveniently neglected to mention that the right to keep and bear arms is protected by the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but let’s take a deeper look at this statement.
Throughout the country, a driver’s license is only needed to drive a motor vehicle on public roadways, and vehicles only need to be registered if they are going to be used on these same public roadways. Furthermore, a driver’s license obtained in any state is honored throughout the whole country.
It’s also worth noting that there are no background checks required for purchasing a vehicle, and no federal laws mandate how these vehicles are to be stored on one’s own property.
As the NRA Institute for Legislative Action (ILA) noted, “With their insistence that gun owners and guns be treated like drivers and motor vehicles, are gun-control advocates conceding that firearms kept at a person’s home or business for self-defense should be wholly unregulated? Doubtful. The closest analogue to a driver’s license in firearm regulation would be the Right-to-Carry permit, as both are for using the related items in public spaces.”
In reality, Obama and those with his politics—most notably his former vice president—find any angle they can to push for increasingly restrictive gun-control policies. To claim that firearms should be regulated like cars in the name of being “pragmatic” while simultaneously pushing overreaching, unconstitutional policies is flatly dishonest to its core.
