(Of note: The Clintons are now the first family with three members having one or more “Unethical Quotes” on Ethics Alarms)
“It matters to me that my mom also recognizes the role the Supreme Court has when it comes to gun control. With Justice Scalia on the bench, one of the few areas where the Court actually had an inconsistent record relates to gun control. Sometimes the court upheld local and state gun control measures as being compliant with the Second Amendment and sometimes the court struck them down. So if you listen to Moms Demand Action and the Brady Campaign and the major efforts pushing for smart, sensible and enforceable gun control across our country — in disclosure, have endorsed my mom — they say they believe the next time the Court rules on gun control, it will make a definitive ruling. So it matters to me that my mom’s the only person running for President who not only makes that connection but also has a strong record on gun control and standing up to the NRA. This is one of those issues I didn’t know I could care more about until I became a mother. And I think every day about the Sandy Hook families whose children every day, don’t come home from school. And I can’t even imagine that living horror and tragedy.”
—-Chelsea Clinton, semi-incoherently campaigning for Mom this week.
Law professor Ann Althouse was really irritated by this speech, and posted twice about it. She points out that the Supreme Court in fact does not have an “inconsistent record” on gun control, so this statement is either ignorant or untrue—a tough call, since it’s Chelsea, and there is no reason to believe that she knows what she’s talking about, and she’s also a Clinton, which means that lying is in her DNA.
Althouse notes that the assertion about the Court sometimes upholding local and state gun control measures as Second Amendment compliant and sometimes striking them down is “flat-out false.” Incompetent, irresponsible, or dishonest? Only Chelsea knows for sure, but “unethical” covers all three. Writes Althouse:
“She’s saying the cases are in disarray and the time is ripe for clearing up the confusion, getting to something “definitive,” but that’s not true. She’s really promoting changing the law that got settled in 2 very high profile, extensively briefed and argued cases that produced carefully thought out opinions. The Second Amendment does require application in particular cases (such as the case from last month, Caetano v. Massachusetts, which said the right included stun guns). So there are details to work out, but things have not been left in a state of confusion or in need of “a definitive ruling.”
Ah, but the whole idea is to mislead and misinform vulnerable, ignorant, gullible voters, correct? This is a call to effectively overturn the Second Amendment, which is obviously what Clinton (and Obama) would love to do. Any lingering doubtd should be washed away by Chelsea’s grand finish about Sandy Hook, a shameless appeal to emotion by referring to a massacre that existing and proposed gun regulations and laws couldn’t have prevented, and that nothing short of gun-banning and confiscation, or pre-crime detection, could have prevented.
There are too many policy issues debated at an infantile level to count, but none are more unethically and cynically presented to the public than guns.
Meanwhile, I hope some time when Hillary is talking about income inequality and privilege, someone asks how it is that an individual who expresses herself as badly as Chelsea and who has no apparent outstanding abilities clears about a million dollars a year between her Clinton Foundation salary and speaking fees.
Ethics Alarms 
“Meanwhile, I hope some time when Hillary is talking about income inequality and privilege, someone asks how it is that an individual who expresses herself as badly as Chelsea and who has no apparent outstanding abilities clears about a million dollars a year between her Clinton Foundation salary and speaking fees.”
Answer: She’s a Clinton. You know, shhhhhh! white privilege. The same way she got into Stanford. The same way her husband got a hedge fund to run all by his own self.
I have been interested in the 2nd Amendment debate for over a quarter of a century. In the early days, I honestly believed that there were good points on both sides of a reasonable debate both consistent with the idea that the 2nd Amendment is a fundamental individual civil liberty.
At some point in time, I concluded that there was a certain faction of political thinking that had no interest in an honest debate at all. But rather, this political faction was in fact a political elite that feared the political power of the American people and especially their potential “last ditch” power of armed insurrection if things got too far gone.
Today, about 100 million Americans own about 300 million small arms and the government really doesn’t know exactly who these people are or where they keep their guns. This is a frightening thought to those political elitist who realize that the American military presently has only 1.4 million personnel in active duty and about another 0.8 million in reserve, for a total of only 2.2 million personnel in the military. And then there is the problem, that according to the American way, we are not supposed to use our military against American citizens. There is also the problem that an insurrection, if it occurs, will not be fought according to conventional rules of battle. So, we have left various federal law enforcement agencies, FBI, BATF, DEA, HS, and maybe a few others, and the various state and local law enforcement agencies to deal with this potential problem. But these political elitist don’t trust them either. So it is a worrisome quandary. What to do? Their answer: Some how, take away the civilian owned guns… or at least most of them. Short of that, create a meta-database so that the government knows who owns the guns and where they sleep at night.
A couple of years back following Sandy Hook I believe, Tom Brokaw on one of the morning news talk shows suggested smugly, and with a straight face that Americans could certainly keep their privately owned guns but perhaps the solution to the gun violence problem was to require that private citizens store their lawfully owned firearms in a community armory and that when they wanted to use them they came down and checked them out and then returned them when finished.
Clearly, Tom Brokaw did not understand the basic concept of the 2nd Amendment or how his idea was obviously a serious abridgment of the 2nd Amendment.
Of course, Hillary Clinton is of the same mindset. All of the present day gun control organizations are the same. They emphasize “common sense gun “safety measures.” They all say the same thing and they rarely use the words “banned” or “forfeited” or “confiscation”. But that is, in my humble opinion, the end game for some political elitists in the United States today.
I will also take issue with the claim that American has a out of control “gun violence problem”. Some communities do have a gun violence problem, but it is not wide spread over every region or extending to every community or to every demographic. This is, where it exists, a highly localized and explainable problem.
Nor are there large numbers of little innocent children who are accidentally killed through unsecured privately owned guns. Yes, there are accidents but those accidents are small in number in a nation of about 315 million Americans… about 600 accidental gun deaths in the last reported year I believe. Only a fraction of those were actual innocent children accidentally shot by unsecured guns.
So basically, the gun control political activist have to make up a false narrative of an “out of control gun violence problem” to sell their ideas of “common sense gun safety measures.” (Does anyone remember the “Iron River” false narrative at the start of the Obama Administration?) But the end game is obvious. They want to drastically reduce the number of privately owned firearms in America. And the motivation is clear to me: fear of the American people.
Perhaps Mr. Brokaw was unfamiliar with the fact that, at the first hint of potential rebellion in Virginia, Royal Governor Berkley seized the gunpowder stored in the Powder Magazine in Williamsburg, which was the gunpowder owned by the militia.
I am from Virginia and I believe our current governor would do the same thing. Seriously… if he could…
Some very smart people just don’t get the importance of gun rights to core American beliefs and culture. It’s quite amazing.
Comment of the Day. As I’ll note when I post this for general consumption, I think much of this is a Hanlon’s Razor matter. I don’t see a serious threat of a an armed government takeover, but the ability of a citizen to arm himself is still a vital symbol that it is the citizen who is guaranteed liberty and autonomy. The debate is a little like the voter ID dispute: why have voter IDs if voter fraud isn’t a problem? Because it could be, because of the need for the integrity of the franchise, and, sorry, if there is a price to be paid, pay it.
Point of clarification: When you say that you” don’t see a serious threat of an armed government takeover” are you referring to an armed takeover by citizens? I think that what you mean and I agree. It is certainly not a serious threat presently.
The current established government doesn’t need to do anything to claim its authority. It is already in charge of making and enforcing the laws of the land. In a well ordered society, the citizens voluntarily comply… just like we voluntarily pay our taxes. The 2nd Amendment becomes a big and very problematic issue for the established government if and when the citizens become disenchanted and provoked to resist what they see as the injustice of the government.
And this is where I believe some political elitist like Hillary Clinton are worried. They promise and promise things that they can not pay for or deliver on a sustainable basis and someday the natives might get restless. It is easy for politicians to give away things. It becomes very hard when they have to take things away. And when they do, people become unhappy.
Of course, I am not an advocate for civil insurrection and would hate to see anything like that happen in America. But we would be naive and foolish to presume that it could never happen in America. In fact it did happen in 1861 and odds are that it could happen again if enough citizens become disenchanted with their government.
No, I mean the government, say, declaring Obama President for life. The culture is still basically strong and vital. That “can’t happen here”…yet.
Okay, thanks for the clarification. Yeah, I agree with that also. We are relatively safe from extreme behavior on both accounts… presently.
Well done.
Just for fun, here is an update on Clinton primary ads in Connecticut: one, a little girl asking if Hillary will earn as much as a male president; two, the adult daughter of the Sandy Hook Elementary principal…
The Court is also inconsistent on the first amendment. Sometimes it finds a local law violates it; sometimes it find that it doesn’t.
This is inconsistency in the most infantile sense.
-Jut
It’s not if you view the Court as a partisan political body, which it is not, which is provably false, which it is very harmful to suggest, and which BOTH Democrats and Republicans…and especially despicably, because I assume he knows better—the President, continue to push as the Court’s image. “Consistency” to Chelsae…who is more of an idiot than I thought, apparently—means “Hating the 2nd Amendment and always rubber stamping laws that undermine it” or “siding with the NRA” and always knocking down any attempt at regulations.
Was she bribed by the Republicans?
Many interesting ‘messages’ have been telegraphed to the ear-tuned reader in these posts. Put in the simplest terms there is a political opposition which has begun to feel they are not so much a governed people, but the victims of strange, rather dark, arbitrary governmental decisions which very dramatically affect their lives, their communities, their identity (yep, that means their race, their cultural identification).
But these people have also been – for the last 100 years or so – profoundly indoctrinated (yep, I mean this in the strongest sense of the word) into a belief-set which has more or less totally confused them: their ‘liberal’ thought-managers have established certain parameters for their (so-called) critical thought and at the slightest deviation two things occur: 1) a whole editing mechanism rises up in them to edit and control the thought they think and 2) if they are vocal, and if their views run counter to the ‘accepted views’ and the accepted limits, these folks are condemned with the standard group of labels: racist, religious nut, backward, ‘stupid’, homophobic, anti-progressive. These are powerful ‘magic words’ and, in many cases, they really do have the power to stop a person’s free intellectual thought.
Dot dot dash, dash dot dash, dot dot dot dash dot dot. What is the message coming through? You’re opposed are you? You have your weapons, yes? And?
But when you turn to identity WHAT you are opposed to, well, there everything gets confused. Musky. You walk in a stream of molasses. Is it ‘multiculturalism’? (Read: the deliberate undermining of white identity: white culture: white America: white Europe: forced blending by governmental fiat and supported by a hyper-liberal chorus of Marxian operatives …)
Oh no no. Not that. ‘We must restore a Conservative platform’ (or the integrity of Christianity or return to Constitutional forms) from assaults by … ??? What exactly is assaulting you? I suggest that this does not seem to come into sharp focus, because to sharply focus is to sharply see, and to see sharply is the discern, and that means a discriminating mind, and that implies a training in discriminating understanding, which is next to impossible within a cultural system that is filled with so much static and noise is it next to impossible to impossible to bring vision into focus.
Is determining things really ‘seeing clearly’? Or is determining things an ideological act? An imposition?
Another reason for the Second Amendment.
https://disqus.com/home/discussion/wspatv/gamecocks_football_coach_fires_chaplain/#comment-2632024032
– Pat Hines
It hasn’t been publicized much, but Chelsea’s reply to Hillary’s early email about Benghazi revealed what she thinks are the core amendments:
“I am so sorry about the State Department officer killed in Libya and the ongoing precariousness in Egypt and Libya. Such anathema to us as Americans – and a painful reminder or how long it took modernism to take root in the US, after the Enlightenment, the 14th, 15th, 16th 19th amendments, removal of censorship norms and laws, etc. Heading to bed to read. A strange day here. Another bright blue beautiful chilly September 11th. Much to discuss when we can talk, hopefully tomorrow? ”
Click to access C05794190.pdf
What species of human is it who heard about Benghazi and immediately thought of how grateful they were for the income tax?
Creepy. It’s like they speak to each other in propaganda even when no one else is listening.
“…clears about a million dollars a year between her Clinton Foundation salary and speaking fees.” I’d pay her this much NOT to speak, if I had it.
Yale must be SO proud.
Stanford and Oxford, I meant.