California: Ground Zero for Complete Gun Ban
Charlton Heston
March 9, 2000
If you want to own any firearm for any reason anywhere in America, you need to watch a startling television report sponsored by the NRA that's currently airing and tracks the explosion of anti-gun laws worldwide; and now in California.
If California, as so often in the past, turns out to be ground zero for the expansion of this movement into America, your rights are clearly in danger.
Election Day 2000 is your best opportunity to defend them.
So get ready for a fight. You've seen how England, Australia and Canada have passed one anti-gun law after another.
What you may not know, unless you've seen the latest NRA report, is that those countries are just a few steps ahead of the United States – and just the most visible victims of a contagion that's spreading worldwide.
In 1996, Australian politicians used the hysteria surrounding a media- sensationalized mass murder to impose, in just weeks, a total ban on all semi- automatic and pump-action rifles and shotguns.
Since those firearms were all already registered, authorities knew exactly whom to contact to confiscate each gun.
In all, they rounded up 640,000 privately owned firearms, which they sawed up in machine shops and sold for scrap steel. Now, any firearms that haven't been banned in Australia must be unloaded, disassembled and sealed in safes with ammunition locked up elsewhere.
The result?
Now in Australia, gun murders are up, firearms assaults are up, armed robberies are up, and home invasions are up.
Watch NRA's latest video production on television and you'll meet the victims first-hand. They have dire warnings for the United States, warnings every American gun owner must heed.
In South Africa, as you'll see, the politics are different, but the price is the same.
After apartheid, a new democratically elected government rode into office on promises of equal rights for all, black or white, rich or poor. But now, that same government is pushing ever-increasing restrictions on the gun rights of citizens: new gun registration and owner licensing requirements, increased fees, and a lifetime ownership limit of one firearm for self-defense.
South African anti-gun politicians soft-sell the new laws, but as Sheena Duncan, a spokeswoman for the anti-gun lobby admitted on camera, "Our ultimate goal is no guns in private hands at all."
That is, except for the criminals.
Today, despite South Africa's already-strict anti-gun laws, 25,000 murders and more than 40,000 rapes are committed each year.
Nearly 1,300 policemen have been killed in the line of duty since 1994. All who obey the law – black and white, rich and poor – suffer, while criminals thrive, all in the name of "global disarmament."
That's what this is, as you'll see in the NRA's report. During the past seven years, at least 25 nations have tightened anti-gun laws or banned guns. Now, countries that don't tolerate any freedom are plotting, through the United Nations, to stomp out firearms freedom wherever it exists – especially the United States. California proves it.
Last year, Gov. Davis signed five new anti-gun bills into law, including a broad extension of the infamous Roberti-Roos semi-auto ban that's taking ordinary hunting rifles that have been around for nearly half a century – such as the Remington Model 7400 and Browning BAR – off store shelves.
Now the Democrats, who control both houses of California's legislature, want to impose far more restrictions. One proposal, cooked up by Handgun Control, Inc., would require registration of all handguns along with annual renewals, fingerprinting, competency tests and ownership inventories.
As one California lawmaker told the Los Angeles Times, "Registration is the next logical step." What's the next step? If California follows the path of England and Australia, confiscation is next. And if California legislation becomes the model for the nation – as it did when the state's 1989 gun bans went into Clinton's Crime Bill of 1994 – your rights are in peril now.
Congressional and presidential candidates are watching California closely. If you want to keep your Second Amendment rights, you need to listen to their every word, alert fellow shooters, hunters and gun owners of what's afoot and what's at stake – and then vote accordingly on Nov. 7.
So watch the NRA video on television, and tell friends and co-workers to do the same. Get them to join the NRA and keep up with events through the Internet, at www.nralive.com and www.nraila.org. Together, we can stop this epidemic as we did in the elections of 1994, but only if every gun owner and American who cherishes freedom knows of the danger and takes steps to combat it.
Charlton Heston is President of the National Rifle Association. This article is reprinted with permission of the NRA.
Read Charlton Heston's "Winning the Culture War" Speech
Charlton Heston
March 9, 2000
If you want to own any firearm for any reason anywhere in America, you need to watch a startling television report sponsored by the NRA that's currently airing and tracks the explosion of anti-gun laws worldwide; and now in California.
If California, as so often in the past, turns out to be ground zero for the expansion of this movement into America, your rights are clearly in danger.
Election Day 2000 is your best opportunity to defend them.
So get ready for a fight. You've seen how England, Australia and Canada have passed one anti-gun law after another.
What you may not know, unless you've seen the latest NRA report, is that those countries are just a few steps ahead of the United States – and just the most visible victims of a contagion that's spreading worldwide.
In 1996, Australian politicians used the hysteria surrounding a media- sensationalized mass murder to impose, in just weeks, a total ban on all semi- automatic and pump-action rifles and shotguns.
Since those firearms were all already registered, authorities knew exactly whom to contact to confiscate each gun.
In all, they rounded up 640,000 privately owned firearms, which they sawed up in machine shops and sold for scrap steel. Now, any firearms that haven't been banned in Australia must be unloaded, disassembled and sealed in safes with ammunition locked up elsewhere.
The result?
Now in Australia, gun murders are up, firearms assaults are up, armed robberies are up, and home invasions are up.
Watch NRA's latest video production on television and you'll meet the victims first-hand. They have dire warnings for the United States, warnings every American gun owner must heed.
In South Africa, as you'll see, the politics are different, but the price is the same.
After apartheid, a new democratically elected government rode into office on promises of equal rights for all, black or white, rich or poor. But now, that same government is pushing ever-increasing restrictions on the gun rights of citizens: new gun registration and owner licensing requirements, increased fees, and a lifetime ownership limit of one firearm for self-defense.
South African anti-gun politicians soft-sell the new laws, but as Sheena Duncan, a spokeswoman for the anti-gun lobby admitted on camera, "Our ultimate goal is no guns in private hands at all."
That is, except for the criminals.
Today, despite South Africa's already-strict anti-gun laws, 25,000 murders and more than 40,000 rapes are committed each year.
Nearly 1,300 policemen have been killed in the line of duty since 1994. All who obey the law – black and white, rich and poor – suffer, while criminals thrive, all in the name of "global disarmament."
That's what this is, as you'll see in the NRA's report. During the past seven years, at least 25 nations have tightened anti-gun laws or banned guns. Now, countries that don't tolerate any freedom are plotting, through the United Nations, to stomp out firearms freedom wherever it exists – especially the United States. California proves it.
Last year, Gov. Davis signed five new anti-gun bills into law, including a broad extension of the infamous Roberti-Roos semi-auto ban that's taking ordinary hunting rifles that have been around for nearly half a century – such as the Remington Model 7400 and Browning BAR – off store shelves.
Now the Democrats, who control both houses of California's legislature, want to impose far more restrictions. One proposal, cooked up by Handgun Control, Inc., would require registration of all handguns along with annual renewals, fingerprinting, competency tests and ownership inventories.
As one California lawmaker told the Los Angeles Times, "Registration is the next logical step." What's the next step? If California follows the path of England and Australia, confiscation is next. And if California legislation becomes the model for the nation – as it did when the state's 1989 gun bans went into Clinton's Crime Bill of 1994 – your rights are in peril now.
Congressional and presidential candidates are watching California closely. If you want to keep your Second Amendment rights, you need to listen to their every word, alert fellow shooters, hunters and gun owners of what's afoot and what's at stake – and then vote accordingly on Nov. 7.
So watch the NRA video on television, and tell friends and co-workers to do the same. Get them to join the NRA and keep up with events through the Internet, at www.nralive.com and www.nraila.org. Together, we can stop this epidemic as we did in the elections of 1994, but only if every gun owner and American who cherishes freedom knows of the danger and takes steps to combat it.
Charlton Heston is President of the National Rifle Association. This article is reprinted with permission of the NRA.
Read Charlton Heston's "Winning the Culture War" Speech