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Giffords Can’t Hide From Their Founder’s “No More Guns” Demand

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As hard as the senior staff at Giffords may try to convince the public that the gun control group is only interested in a few “common sense” and “reasonable” restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms, there’s simply no getting around the fact that their founder is vehemently opposed to gun ownership altogether.

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The gun control group is using the Veteran’s Day holiday to push for “commonsense gun safety regulations” on social media, and declared that “it’s not a binary choice of guns or no guns.”

As several X users reminded the anti-gun organization, however, their own founder would disagree with that statement. According to Gabby Giffords, it is a binary choice, and she’s come down on the side of “no more guns.”

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I’m honestly somewhat surprised that Time hasn’t conveniently taken their story offline so gun owners can’t link back to their story quoting Gabby Giffords on her fundamental goal for her organization. Published in April of this year, the piece by Philip Elliott included portions of a sit-down interview with the former congresswoman, including her blunt statement about wanting to get rid of every gun in the country.

Giffords has the gravitas befitting a former member of Congress, a personal story that few—although too many—can match, and a manner that makes saying no to her near impossible. It would be folly to mistake her slow walk for weakness, her sometimes halting speech for confusion about the tasks at hand. From the outside, it would appear she is struggling, but it’s clear in conversations with her and her coterie that she’s never been more clear about the mission.

…

As we wrap our interview in her office, I ask how she keeps coming back to a challenge so deeply ingrained in politics. She pauses for 12 pregnant seconds.

“No more guns,” she says.

Ambler, her aide and adviser, tries to clarify that she means no more gun violence, but Giffords is clear about what she’s saying. “No, no, no,” she says. “Lord, no.” She pauses another 32 seconds. “Guns, guns, guns. No more guns. Gone.”

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Elliott and Giffords’ aides did their utmost to downplay her remarks. At one point in his piece Elliott claimed that “even their [Giffords and husband Mark Kelly] biggest critics know better than to call them anti-gun activists”; an absolutely absurd assertion given that she told him her goal is “no more guns.” He also helped cover for her when another aide tried to explain away her remarks.

An aide clarifies that she’s talking about Australia, where gun sales were outlawed after a mass shooting and existing weapons were purchased by the government. Giffords nods in the affirmative. It’s an idealistic goal, for sure, and one perhaps mismatched for the moment in this country. But Giffords has an answer for that: “Legislation, legislation, legislation.”

Gun sales were not outlawed in Australia after their compensated confiscation program in the late 1990s. In fact, there are more privately owned firearms in Australia today than before the “buyback” took place. Those are the facts, but they don’t change the spin that the Giffords team tried to put on her comments with help from the Time reporter. According to them, she doesn’t actually want “no more guns,” just a ban on gun sales and the government purchase of “existing weapons”. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like “no more guns” to me, even if that’s not what actually happened in Australia.

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Gabby Giffords has the right to her opinion, obviously. Second Amendment supporters, however, are under no obligation to aid or abet that delusion, and they have their own right to remind the public of what her stated agenda actually is, instead of what the organization that bears her name pretends it to be.

The Federalist Explores What US Would Look Like Without Guns

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There’s no nation on Earth where guns are completely and totally banned. There’s always some group of people who aren’t police or military who can lawfully own firearms. The question is just how small that group is.

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American gun control groups are dedicated to making that group as small as humanly possible–they say they don’t want gun bans, and if they’re honest about that, then this is what they mean–and they have ideas about what the United States would look like if we suddenly did away with the Second Amendment.

Over at The Federalist, writer Aaron Decorte argues that it won’t be what they’d like to believe.

Thought experiment, leaving aside the issue of a right enshrined in the Constitution: If Americans allow their firearms to be outlawed and then confiscated, would we in fact, become like Australia or New Zealand?

If we gave up AR-15s and then a mass shooting took place where a semi-automatic handgun was used, opponents of gun rights would take those too — the same with a shooter with a hunting rifle, then a shooter with a shotgun, and on and on. We know where this leads. It can’t end with “military style” firearms. A confiscation of AR-15s would eventually lead to a complete ban on almost every gun. How long would that take? Five years, 10 years? It wouldn’t take very long once the ball is rolling and mass shooters move to handguns and shotguns, which would quickly be banned as the public’s demand for “safety” would be too much for politicians to stand against.

Cut to a Republican senator being interviewed on CNN the day after a mass shooting where a 9mm handgun was used: Senator, just a few months ago you voted to ban AR-15s because scores of children were killed in a school shooting. Today, with more dead children, you won’t support the banning of semi-automatic handguns? How can you tell those parents why the shooter was able to legally obtain a Glock 19 that, like the AR-15s that you voted to ban, allowed the shooter to fire many rounds and reload in a matter of seconds? What’s the difference, senator? Do those dead children think it was better to be shot by a handgun rather than a long gun? Senator?

That lawmaker would crumble, and so would others. What would we be left with? A technical right to keep and bear arms that practically renders that right meaningless.

How do we know this? We know this because we have seen this before in Mexico.

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And we all know what a crime-free paradise Mexico is, now don’t we.

Of course, this isn’t a novel concept. Decorte isn’t the only writer to make this argument. There’s this guy named Cam Edwards you might have heard about who basically said the same thing a few months ago:

You know what would happen if every legal gun owner in this country gave up their guns tomorrow? We wouldn’t turn into England or Australia, where violent crime rates have always been lower than the United States, even before they cracked down on legal gun owners. No, we’d turn into Mexico; a nation with very few legal gun owners and a whole lot of armed criminal actors inflicting mayhem and misery on the country at large. Mexico has a single gun store for the entire country and places tight restrictions on who can lawfully own firearms, yet their homicide rate is about five times higher than that of the United States.

This should be pretty obvious.

While gun control advocates would argue that Australia or the UK is the direction we’d head, they’re ignoring fundamental differences between those countries and the US. After all, our non-gun homicide rate is much higher than those nations’ total homicide rates. That suggests there’s more going on than just the availability of firearms.

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Further, there are just too many guns in black market circulation to suddenly make them all go away because of a few new laws being passed.

Sure, you could curtail lawful gun owners, but we know that they’re not the problem. Historically, the issue has never been lawful gun owners, so why are we the ones being punished here? Because anti-gunners can’t differentiate between lawful and unlawful gun owners.

If you remove lawful gun owners from the equation–which is precisely what happens with a British- or Australian-style gun control scheme–then you end up with fewer armed private citizens and just as many armed criminals.

And those criminals aren’t suddenly going to start playing nice simply because you changed the laws. They don’t care about what’s legal and what isn’t.

So yeah, you get Mexico and not Australia.

Unfortunately, the people who most need to understand this aren’t interested in even listening to reason.

Harris Touts Australian Gun Confiscation as Example for U.S. to Follow

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While Joe Biden repeated his demand for Congress to pass a ban on so-called assault weapons on Thursday morning in response to the mass murder of 18 people in Lewiston, Maine, Vice President (and head of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention) Kamala Harris upped the ante in a speech on Thursday afternoon at a luncheon for Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, where she lavished praise on Australia’s compensated confiscation, launched in 1997 after an active shooter attack in Port Arthur, Tasmania.

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Australia’s gun confiscation effort is the gold standard for American gun control advocates, even though the “buyback” only rounded up about 650,000 firearms (at a time when there were estimated to be fewer than 3 million firearms lawfully owned throughout the entire country. Compare that to the 400-450 million guns owned by 90-110 million Americans, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that scaling up Australia’s confiscation efforts to seize a comparable number of legally owned firearms would be impossible, even before factoring in the fact that gun ownership is a protected right here in the U.S, unlike in Australia.

While Harris was lavishing praise on gun confiscation, she also neglected to mention that the 1997 “buyback” wasn’t the end of Australia’s gun control movement. As I discussed not long ago, Western Australia is getting ready to impose a new round of restrictions with a stated goal of reducing legal gun ownership.

Farmers and gun club members will be restricted to 10 firearms while recreational shooters will only be able to own five in a move the government expects will reduce the number of legal firearms in the state from 360,000 to about 347,000.

The ownership cap is included in the government’s firearms bill consultation paper to be released on Tuesday, along with a state-funded voluntary firearm buyback plan.

Police Minister Paul Papalia said the new limits would only impact about 5 per cent of individual licence holders but would remove thousands of firearms from the community.

“Public safety is paramount, and that has been the key consideration when drafting the proposed legislation,” he said.

“If there are fewer firearms in the community, there are fewer opportunities for them to be used illegally.”

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We see that same warped logic here in the United States. In order to stop criminals from using guns, you’ve got to stop people from lawfully purchasing and possessing them first. Democrats in the 1980s derided Ronald Reagan’s “trickle-down economics”, but that’s their strategy when it comes to gun-involved crime: start with the legal guns first and there’ll be a trickle-down effect on criminal acquisition and use of firearms.

If that theory had any merit, Washington, D.C. would have been the safest city in America between 1977 and 2008, when it banned the possession of handguns throughout the city. Instead, D.C. saw a staggering homicide rate of 80.6 murders per 100,000 people in 1991, at the height of the gun ban era. In 2008, when the Supreme Court struck down D.C.’s handgun ban, the homicide rate stood at 31.5 per 100K, still well above the national average. Five years after SCOTUS restored the right to keep a handgun in the home for self-defense, D.C.’s homicide rate was 15.9; one of the lowest homicide rates in half a century.

None of these facts and figures matter to the head of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention or any of the gun control advocates who are staffing it, of course, but for those of us who care about public safety and the fundamental right to self-defense, the Australian example and D.C.’s experience are very informative. Gun controllers won’t give up even after confiscating a third of a nation’s privately-owned firearms, and banning guns is no solution to stopping murders.

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Blunder down under: Australian state moves to limit gun ownership

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How many times have you heard some gun control nut wonder why we can’t do what they did in Australia back in the 1990s and just ban and collect all the guns in the United States? The truth is that Australia’s gun “buyback” didn’t completely disarm Australians, though it did ban them from owning semi-automatic rifles and imposed strict limits on the ownership and possession of handguns and even commonly-owned bolt-action rifles and pump-action shotguns.

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It’s estimated that the compensated confiscation program imposed after the Port Arthur murders in the 1990s ended up collecting about one-third of all lawfully-possessed firearms in Australia, but in the years since Australians have still been purchasing plenty of guns; so much, in fact, that there are now more guns in civilian hands in the country than before the “buyback” was put in place. As we discuss on today’s Bearing Arms’ Cam & Co, the gun control lobby down under didn’t fold up their tent and fade away after their success thirty years ago. Their efforts continue to this day, and in the state of Western Australia their now poised for one of their biggest victories in years.

Farmers and gun club members will be restricted to 10 firearms while recreational shooters will only be able to own five in a move the government expects will reduce the number of legal firearms in the state from 360,000 to about 347,000.

The ownership cap is included in the government’s firearms bill consultation paper to be released on Tuesday, along with a state-funded voluntary firearm buyback plan.

Police Minister Paul Papalia said the new limits would only impact about 5 per cent of individual licence holders but would remove thousands of firearms from the community.

“Public safety is paramount, and that has been the key consideration when drafting the proposed legislation,” he said.

“If there are fewer firearms in the community, there are fewer opportunities for them to be used illegally.”

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We hear that same rationale used in the United States all the time, whether it’s Gavin Newsom signing legislation restricting the right to carry or the House Speaker in Massachusetts calling for passage of an omnibus gun control bill aimed at legal gun owners. It’s a ridiculous argument that completely rejects any lawful use of a firearm, whether for self-defense, recreational shooting, hunting, or predator control, and while Australia may not have the right to keep and bear arms enshrined in its constitution as we do in the U.S., blaming lawful gun owners for the actions of violent criminals is still a terrible idea.

Papalia says that the number of lawfully-possessed firearms in Western Australia has increased by 65% since 2009, and clearly that is a bigger problem to authorities than the rise in both violent and property crime in the state over the past few years. There’s no evidence that crimes committed by legal gun owners has increased by 65%, but they’re still being scapegoated for the increase in assaults, sexual offenses, and violations of restraining orders… again, just as we see here in the states.

American gun control activists would love to take a page from their Australian counterparts and impose “common sense” and “reasonable” limits on the number of firearms that we can own. Heck, they’re already taking their first steps by imposing gun-rationing laws that limit purchases to one per month, and there’ve been attempts to limit the amount of ammunition that someone can purchase as well.

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So far those restrictions have been largely placed on the sale, not the possession of guns and ammo, but you don’t have to be Nostradamus to see where the anti-gunners are heading. Australia remains the gold standard for the gun prohibitionists, and if Western Australia is imposing limits on the number of guns that lawful citizens are allowed to possess, it probably won’t be long before we see similar bills introduced in states like California, New York, and New Jersey.