SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
AOC Displays Her Stunning Ignorance of Federal Firearms Laws…Again…Still
By Larry Keane
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s ignorance is showing again. Her latest gaffe is proclaiming “guns are not allowed in the District of Columbia…” in a CNN interview with Chris Cuomo, brother, of course, to Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, also no stranger to gun control causes.
That might come as a shock to those gun owners living in the District of Columbia. It might also come as a shock to the only federal firearms licensee – DC Security Associates. For that matter, someone might want to explain that to the police department itself, which became the sole licensee for a brief period of time.
If You’re a Lawmaker, Know the Laws
Still, that confusion doesn’t make Rep. Ocasio-Cortez correct, not by a long shot. The District of Columbia’s attempt to deny guns inside the District failed miserably. That resulted in the landmark Heller decision, which affirmed the Second Amendment is an individual right and local authorities cannot ban entire classes of commonly-owned firearms.
Before the case, Washington, D.C. had banned the possession of handguns. In subsequent litigation, the federal courts have ordered that the District must issue licenses to carry firearms to qualified, law-abiding citizens.
That put an end to DC’s ban on handguns. In fact, more than 4,000 people have obtained concealed carry permits from the D.C. police department, which requires hours of classroom instruction and range certification. Over half of those in the last fiscal year were for residents who live outside the District, according to a Washington Post report.
That might end the discussion on whether it’s lawful to exercise fundamental rights in the federal enclave where the nation’s elected representatives meet. It didn’t put an end to Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s ignorance of the law, however.
Clutching Pearls
The congresswoman was making her wildly incorrect remark when she was explaining why she didn’t attend President Joe Biden’s inauguration. She said she didn’t feel safe since fellow members of Congress were asserting their right to keep and bear arms. This is where she might have been confused.Firearm possession within the Capitol Hill complex is forbidden for everyone except Members of Congress and law enforcement. While Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is throwing up metal detectors and having U.S. Representatives get wanded down every time they go into the House chamber to cast their votes, this notion that Members of Congress can’t have guns in the Capitol is bunk.
The last time this came up was in 2015, when Congressman Ken Buck (R-Colo.) took all appropriate steps to hang an American-flag themed Modern Sporting Rifle (MSR) in his Capitol Hill office. It was unloaded, the bolt removed and disabled with a trigger lock. Gun control politicians clutched their pearls and shrieked that such an abomination couldn’t be tolerated. Except that it can.
“Members of Congress may maintain firearms within the confines of their office,” explained Kimberly Schneider, a spokesperson for Capitol Hill police, “and they and any employee or agent of any member of Congress may transport within the Capitol Grounds firearms unloaded and securely wrapped.”
The same rule also explains that no one “shall carry any firearm inside the chamber or on the floor of either House, in any lobby or cloakroom adjacent thereto, in the galleries of either House or in the Marble Room of the Senate or Rayburn Room of the House unless assigned or approved by the two Sergeants of Arms for maintenance of adequate security.”
Just so we’re keeping it easy to understand…guns are legal in Washington, D.C. and Members of Congress can have guns in their office. Rules adopted by the House of Representatives forbids them on the floor of the House chamber, in the respective lobbies and cloakroom or designated rooms.
Blinded by Bias
This isn’t the first-time Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s ignorance of federal firearm laws has been on full display. She infamously accused fellow Congressman Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) of wanting to lend firearms to “people unsupervised who can’t pass a background check.” In the same tweet, she accused any friends of Rep. Crenshaw to “have likely abused their spouse or have a violent criminal record, & you may not know it.”If Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez took time to understand the Constitution she’s sworn to defend, or the laws she purports to understand and advance, she would know that it’s a felony to knowingly transfer a firearm to a prohibited individual. This includes domestic abusers.
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s comments in which she bungled gun laws and Constitutional rights started with her saying that she didn’t feel safe and claimed many other Members of Congress agreed with her. She didn’t offer any other names or even attempt at putting a number on it. She did willingly ignore that a concern for safety is exactly why more than 8.4 million people purchased a firearm for the first time last year, among the 21 million background checks for a gun sale.
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez has sponsored 29 bills and amendments. None of her bills have passed the House of Representatives, controlled by her fellow Democrats. Only two of her amendments have passed, one by voice vote and one by recorded vote. A courtesy she might want to consider on behalf of the people she’s elected to represent would be to understand the laws before she attempts to destroy them.
https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/aoc-displays-stunning-ignorance-of-federal-firearms-laws-again-still/
NOTE: It isn't just AOC. It seems that Dem lawmakers who know the law are an overwhelming minority. We are constantly bombarded with soundbytes about the "gunshow loophole" - which does not exist. Usually, when that purported loophole is mentioned, Dems are trying to prohibit the transfer of any weapon between any two people who are not federally licensed dealers. Lawmakers either don't know the law, or they are purposely trying to confuse voters on the issue.
(Score: 2, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday January 29 2021, @02:02AM (14 children)
So you reckon she has an inability to convey simple thoughts accurately in plain English rather than being an idiot? You realize that the former proves the latter for a governmental official in an English speaking country, yes?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Touché) by FatPhil on Friday January 29 2021, @09:30AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 29 2021, @09:16PM (11 children)
Wonder why you weren't so motivated to harp on verbal mistakes when more serious supposed mistakes were made pretty much daily for the last four years.
This is a tough one, might take the ol' Cray a few years to crunch through the data on the two options: idiot or hypocrite.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by hemocyanin on Saturday January 30 2021, @07:51AM (10 children)
All the fascism I'm seeing is coming from the left. It's surprising to me as a lifelong liberal but I've realized I've only walked a path with the left for a spell and it seems now, that I'll be walking a path with the right so long as they aren't the present fascists.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 30 2021, @04:28PM (9 children)
By my count, the last time that liberals and progressives were firmly on the same side was the civil rights era of the '50s-'70s. Gay rights kind of extended that to some extent, and there was some positive momentum there, but by the '90s it was clear that the progressive nanny state attitude was putting a lot of liberals off.
That was thirty years ago.
Now the progressives have given up any pretence of being liberal.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by hemocyanin on Saturday January 30 2021, @06:46PM (8 children)
I became voting age in the late 80s, my parents were hippies and though we never talked politics, my indoctrination would have made voting Republican unthinkable. My indoctrination and my subsequent independent thought as I grew older, lead me to value personal liberty over all else. So in the 90s when the right was pretty harsh on the social issues -- Contract with America, Evangelicals wanting to put god everywhere, requiring conformity, stuff like that -- I identified with the opposition to that authoritarian system of thought. (yes, there is Tipper Gore -- I just ignored her as an outlier)
As for monetary issues, I was too young and dumb to comprehend what Clinton was doing to our economy back then (he was my first presidential vote) and so those things didn't really affect my perception of Dems or the left as being on my side. I was wrong about them of course, and now the Dems are still playing that same game from the 90s -- focus on social issues to distract from economics, which works because social issues are easy to comprehend and economic ones are hard. The difference this time around though, is that the Dems (and of course their partners in corporate America) are adopting the openly racist C*T views as cover for their financial rape of America. For those like me who value personal liberty and oppose authoritarian, conformist, and ultimately violent forms of government, that makes the right look like bearers of freedom and liberty for the time being. I'm sure it won't always be so, but that's the current state of affairs as I see them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 30 2021, @11:15PM (2 children)
So this is how it happens? A liberal gradually loses his mind as he ages, becomes a supporter of facism and white supremacism? Bet there is a radicalization case study of you down at the FBI, hemo! Cool story, Bro!
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by hemocyanin on Sunday January 31 2021, @01:05AM (1 child)
"I fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag." Paraphrased. This was wrong. I'm shocked to see it was the Left who've brought it, and a rework is necessary: "when fascism came to America it rode an ass down Wall St."
Anyway ...
These things are not liberal values:
Interventionist wars.
Enforced conformity of thought and behavior.
Racism.
Blind ideological faith, whether that be religion or unfalsfiable Critical * Theories (indeed, criticize at your peril).
Censorship.
Derision, derogation, and sabotage of the working class in favor of the managerial class and the elites.
All the above define the current Democrat and Leftist trajectory, perhaps not in their rhetoric, but in their acts (which is the only thing that matters). If your argument is that being a non-racist egalitarian peace loving person who believes people should pursue any life that makes them happy so long as they are not interfering with others' right to do the same, makes me a a Nazi in the modern sense of the term, then by all means, call me one. I don't give a fuck anymore because I've come to understand this trick of language. But realize, it is you who is acting like the Nazis of history, the actual ones, the ones who embraced in various flavors, the above list. You and those of your ideology carry in your hearts, the seed of genocide.
So if I have to join cause with Newt while you remain a threat, I will. Not blindly. I know the authoritarian streak runs on the Right too and after having been betrayed by the Left on this topic, I'm very well aware of the difference between friends and temporary allies. But one thing is 100% clear -- the Democrat-Oligarch-Complex is the bringer of true, not rhetorical, fascism, and I'll ally with any who would defeat the DOC.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 31 2021, @02:16AM
Parent should be boosted. A lot.
But to a certain extent, I think that the progressives are trying to wrap themselves in the flag - just not specifically a hypermilitaristic one. Instead they're taking another leaf from Mussolini's book, and Hitler's.
It's not well-remembered, but one early way in which both of the above garnered support was by supporting social services for their in-group. WWI veterans got recognition and benefits in both Italy and Germany, and there were policy moves afoot to boost the poorer parts of the population as well. That's how they proved that Il Duce/Der Fuehrer were genuinely on the side of the little guy, against all those nasty war profiteers and financiers. They got a lot of popular support that way.
Now we have the DNC talking up how they want to juice the bennies for all their poor dispossessed victims of globoracicapitalistic EXPLOITATIONVULTURES. Or something like that. The details hardly matter. All they need is for Joe Sixpack to know that his interests are aligned with those of the DNC, and if he needs proof, all he needs is to watch a Hollywood movie or watch CNN, MSNBC or one of their buddies.
They learned their lessons well.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 31 2021, @12:29AM (4 children)
I can see how you got there, but even by '92 it was clear that the star of a lot of evangelicals was waning, even within the republican ranks (which is why so many of the republicans who defected to Perot didn't give a damn about social issues at the time, and didn't start to, when they came back). At the same time the democrats were learning that while abortion was generally unpopular in many quarters, the general degree of intensity around banning it was pretty low except in a narrow group. By contrast, their assault weapons ban managed to piss off a wide section of the electorate, and they discovered that while they might have a small and loud group on their side, the general view was against them. This showed that they weren't at all afraid of being the nanny state party, while the republicans were chafing under the godbothering yoke.
What actually made it plainer to me at the time wasn't even Tipper Gore, or the early nonsense around political correctness and rewriting vocabulary (so well satirised in Bloom County) but Hillary's push for a dictatorial rewrite of health care legislation, paired with the growing push to regulate how universities were run. Tipper got more headlines, but Hillary and her set were saying the quiet part loud long before anybody had heard about Monica.
For my part I was still pretty sympathetic to the democrats all the way through Obama's first term. I'd bought the clintonesque story about triangulation, although I disliked many of the results, and I didn't like Bush Junior, but Obama's crew really showed me that the Clinton-era nods to authoritarianism weren't just a fluke of the time, but a lasting policy.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by hemocyanin on Sunday January 31 2021, @01:11AM (3 children)
Yes -- Obama's first term. "Look forward not backward" was my first red pill, the balance of his two terms the rest of the bottle.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 31 2021, @06:13AM (2 children)
C'mon, hemo! We are past the lies and fibs! Trump lost! Time for you to just come out and admit you are a racist! Yes, everyone will hold it against you, but the first step is always admitting you have a problem. If you do not, we will have to start shoving stuff down your throat, for your own good.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 01 2021, @04:27AM (1 child)
See, here's the funny thing about that.
When everyone's a racist, nobody's a racist. It loses its sting. (I know, I know, the melanin-enhanced can't be racist according to CRT thinking. Nobody else believes that shit, but whatever helps you sleep nights ...)
We're all racist, racists as can be. You are too, just like me ... but I think we'll need a new word to describe people who exhibit bigotry on the basis of superficial features. Varietist?
I haven't heard much in the way of varietist thinking from hemocyanin.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 01 2021, @10:03AM
Seriously? Listen in the higher ranges, like dogwhistle frequencies.
Hemo is a particularly disgusting tone of yellow, not white, and not in any way Asian, more like jaundice, or putrescence, a particular rotting of the rational faculties. That is why he does not like BLM. Racist.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday January 31 2021, @05:13PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?