One of the presidents signature issues is “sentencing reform.” By this is meant a comprehensive bill altering Federal prison sentences, mostly, reducing them, Particularly for drug dealers, even drug dealers who used firearms and committed violent crimes as part of their “business.”
While we have strong opinions on the probable results of releasing tens of thousands of proven criminals, the Senate bill has a paragraph banning statutorily the dissemination of information about firearms that the Administration has tried to ban by executive action, through the State Department’s. Apparently, Gun Owners of America caught this detail way back in October.
Remember the Obama administration’s efforts to criminalize posting “how-to” gun information on the Internet? That’s in the bill, too.
Thus, under section 108, anyone putting “technical data” with respect to guns on the Munitions List on the Internet is liable for a five year mandatory minimum prison sentence — even if it is only in a private e-mail.
And this is because the Obama administration has indicated that it will regard a transmission on the Internet to be a communication with any person or country with access to the Internet.
This provision would do several things. First, it would probably moot Defense Distributed’s 1st Amendment (among other things) challenge to this national socialist speech code. Second, it would not just ban, but criminalize a great deal of the information posted here, and at other websites and forums. Gunsmithing how-tos on You Tube? Stroke of the pen, illegal; they’d have to go. Even the AGI DVD gunsmithing courses would be subject to onerous ITAR and other State Department regulations.
It actually redefines the public service this blog provides as, literally, “providing goods and services to terrorists.” (Congressional Research Service Summary of S.2123).
“There will be massive civil disobedience,” you may counter. “People will overwhelm the authorities with noncompliance.”
They do not want a bill they can enforce evenly. The beauty of a bill that criminalizes tens of thousands is that it can be enforced selectively, politically.
The State Department, in Washington, is thought to need something to do. They have done such a fine job advancing American interests around the world that they’re done with that and ready to move on to higher priorities.
And there actually are Feds who have nothing to do: for example, the Special Agents and Removal Officers of the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Agency, who have been enjoined from arresting criminal aliens and deporting them for political reasons, would easily be redirected against gun owners, builders, hobbyists, and technologists, especially once their leaders are done demonizing us.
It’s not surprising to see proven national socialists like Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Mark Kirk (R-IL) supporting this language. It’s not surprising to see phony Vietnam veteran, Dick Blumenthal (D-CT), whose loathing for real veterans is ever manifest, supporting several provisions that label veterans as second-class citizens, and allow them to be stripped of their firearms rights with a stroke of a political appointee’s pen.
