Targeting the Gun Lobby ► An Aunty Em Editorial

Ever since it became apparent in the aftermath of the Newtown Massacre that ‘Merka was fed up, and a consensus was developing to finally take some action on gun violence, Gun Nuts have been muttering, stuttering, and fluttering in the hopes of distracting the public conversation away from the human lives destroyed by guns. 

When President Obama sat down this week and signed several Executive
Orders that might save a few human lives here and there, the Gun Nuts
lost whatever was left of their collective minds. And, the Mainstream Media hasn’t helped. The ‘Merkin people have been led to believe that a Presidential Executive Order is an extraordinary thing. Yet, it isn’t at all. Why can’t we have nice things? Because “Sloppy Reporting Misleads the Public on Obama’s Executive Orders.”


Executive Orders are a president’s instructions to the staff at executive branch agencies, defining how they are to implement the laws that already exist. They are not laws themselves. No president can issue an Executive Order to take your guns, or your money, make new laws, or to do anything unconstitutional. And Obama is smart enough not to order actions that won’t survive legal challenges.

Executive Orders are constitutionally valid. The Constitution’s Article II, Section 1, Clause 1 – The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America – gives the president that ability. Each order’s preamble states his specific legal authority for the subject of the order. Every president has issued Executive Orders. Governors and mayors also issue Executive Orders to their staffs.

The orders are numbered consecutively. George Washington issued EO number 1. To date, President Obama has issued 146 Executive Orders, numbered 13489 through 13635. That’s an average of about 310 orders per president. President Franklin Roosevelt holds the record at 3,466, over more than three terms in office. Herbert Hoover – a Republican – is second with 1,011 in only one term. Ronald Reagan had 380 (two terms); George H.W. Bush 165 (one term); Bill Clinton 363 (two terms); and George W. Bush 290 (two terms).

However, to hear the Reich Wing’s version, the Socialist/Communist/Fascist Obama is coming for your guns, despite the fact that he isn’t really. It’s a sad commentary on our media that — ONCE AGAIN — it takes Jon Stewart and Steve Colbert to put all this talk about President Obama shredding the 2nd Amendment into the proper perspective.

First up, Jon Stewart puts the lie to that stupid Talking Point that Hitler could have been stopped in his tracks if those brave Jews in the ghetto had guns:

I wish armed Jews in the ghetto could stop Hitler.  But my feeling was, France couldn’t.  And I’m pretty sure they had guns.  Russia had kind of a lot of guns, and they couldn’t stop Hitler, until you factored in the wind chill.

It’s an awful lot to put on an oppressed minority, when it took the
free world 5 to 6 years of all-out total war to stop that motherfucker.
 So let’s stop arguing these “what ifs”.

 Stewart had a lot more to say. Watch:

Then Steve Colbert reminded us that “Like anybody setting up a new government, the Founders added a clause
that said, ‘If you don’t like what we’re doing, feel free to shoot us.’
” And, Colbert didn’t stop there, dedicating a whole segment of The WORD to remind us why the Founding Fathers had their shit together.

To get serious for a moment: It’s important that rational thinking people push back against all this Gun Nuttery™ and expose it for what it really is. The more people that believe The Big NRA Lie that President Obama is coming after your guns, the closer ‘Merka gets to an armed insurrection.

Do you honestly believe there’s not currently militia groups already training for “Second Amendment Remedies“? They’ve been fed 4 years of “Obama is not a legitimate president” who has been “frog-marching the nation into total enslavement.” [see: Fox “News” any day that ends in “Y”] With the latest message being “HE’S COMING FOR YOUR GUNS BY ROYAL FIAT!!!” I fear we are teetering on the brink of another Waco, or Ruby Ridge, or Oklahoma City, or worse.

I’ve already told Pops that if and when the gunfire seems to be coming closer to the condo, we are grabbing my Canadian citizenship and riding it as far as it can take us.

I wish I were kidding.

About Headly Westerfield

Calling himself “A liberally progressive, sarcastically cynical, iconoclastic polymath,” Headly Westerfield has been a professional writer all his adult life.