Hillary Clinton is the media's definition of "pro-gun"?

Big City Mayors continue to look for a scapegoat for their crime problem

By Brian S. Stewart

Hillary Clinton is doing her best to tiptoe around the gun issue during her attempts to win rural votes in Pennsylvania. But even a scaled-down-on-gun-control Hillary Clinton means calls for a renewed crackdown on interstate gun “trafficking” and a renewal of an assault weapons ban. In a recent speech on fighting crime she even noted “a direct correlation to illegal gun sales and homicides”. Yet in the eyes of the mainstream media she’s dodging the issue by not explicitly endorsing Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter's array of new gun control laws.

The Boston Globe article has all sorts of little anti-gun sound bites that are spouted off as gospel. A Democratic consultant opines that Clinton doesn’t want to irritate her rural, blue collar constituency, "But I don't know how you talk about homicide in Philadelphia without talking about guns."

I do. Talk about violent crime and those that commit it. Talk about decaying inner cities and the conditions which perpetuate these cycles of violence. Talk about drugs and drug dealers. Talk about gangs. Even if you removed guns, which is impossible, these conditions would still exist. And violent criminals always find ways to be violent criminals.

Sadly, the solution for big city politicians is always to disarm the law-abiding in the face of rising threats to their safety. Big-city politicians like Mayor Nutter continually fail to keep their citizens safe, and continually look to guns as a convenient scapegoat. The article notes that Nutter signed five new guns laws “designed to provoke a court fight over the city's ability to regulate guns on its own”. The mayor indulged delusions of grandeur and “likened his defiant gesture to those that earned the country's independence and ended slavery.” Infringing a civil right and diminishing the ability of citizens to protect themselves – yeah, he’s a regular Thomas Jefferson.

The article’s opening paragraph concludes that Clinton was “avoiding a mention of the one thing that local officials see as a consensus solution to their crime problem: new gun laws.” If new gun laws - easily and always ignored by those they seek to disarm – are the big city politicians’ “consensus solution” to crime, then big cities are in more trouble than ever.

And Clinton, for her part, is wildly overplaying her hand in response to Obama’s “bitter” comments. What he said was stupid, damaging, and just plain wrong. But Hillary Clinton playing the pro-gun, friend of the sportsman is even phonier than John Kerry's 2004 goose hunt in Ohio. Recent rallies have seen her calling herself a “pro-gun churchgoer”, and rattling off the same ridiculous hunting story she trotted out a few months ago.

As I’ve mentioned before, it’s almost stunning how much the candidates want to appear to be supportive of the 2nd Amendment – even when they are anything but. Hillary Clinton is no friend of hunters, and she’s certainly no friend of those who see the 2nd Amendment as providing for self-defense.

Brian S. Stewart is a former infantryman and an Iraq War veteran. He recently graduated from the Ohio State University with a degree in Political Science.