Libyan Gun Grabbers Start Grabbing

Wayne LaPierre knows but one rhetorical velocity: ramming speed! As my most recent ATF Death Watch points out, Wayne’s anti-gun-grabbing tirades keep the NRA coffers full, even as they alienate non-gun owning Americans and provide aid and comfort to the enemies of the Second Amendment. But I’m happy to cut the outspoken jefe slack. Although Wayne’s world is a paranoid place, LaPierre never strays far from the truth. And just as Charlton Heston is remembered for his cold dead hands remark, Wayne LaPierre’s “the guys with the guns make the rules” will outlive him. The left took that as a threat. It’s actually a warning about how easy it is to lose liberty—not that the mainstream media understands this . . .

Alarmed at the deadly arsenals piling up in ordinary Libyan neighborhoods, self-appointed community leaders in Tripoli have begun issuing their own gun licenses and, in some cases, conducting raids to retrieve land mines and rockets stored in private homes.

Qatar and other nations flooded Libya with arms during revolutionary forces’ six-month struggle to overthrow longtime leader Moammar Gadhafi. And when the NATO-backed former rebels finally toppled the regime just over a month ago, weapons depots in newly liberated territories were left unguarded, flung open for anyone in the market for anti-aircraft guns, heat-seeking rockets and mortar rounds.

I love it when the mainstream media uses the word “alarmed” when writing “alarmist” stories. It’s so . . . apt. In the case, miamiherald.com wants you to know that—shock horror!—Libya’s private citizens are stockpiling land mines, rockets, heat-seeking rockets, anti-aircraft guns and mortars.

A careful reader might wonder why an average Amadou would want a private stash of land mines, rockets, heat-seeking rockets, anti-aircraft guns and mortars. Perhaps it’s a tribal thing; as in I don’t want my family murdered by a rival tribe or a group of religious fanatics.

Not that the possibility is on the journalist’s [personal] radar. Nope, the faster all these weapons of mass destruction return to “the authorities” the better!

Grassroots initiatives to register or confiscate arms from civilians and former rebels constitute the only real push to track the weapons because the National Transitional Council, the de facto ruling authority, is already overstretched with infighting over other security and political affairs.

Well that sucks. (Or not.) Thank God we have Obama-like community organizers on the case!

The Benghazi-based Libyan Charity Organization, for example, has plans to transform its kitchens – where teenage volunteers prepare more than 10,000 meals a day for front-line fighters – into receiving centers for a new cash-for-guns program once the battlefields have quieted.

“We have no government and we can’t just leave guns in the streets, so what else can we do? We want a peaceful Benghazi,” said Aiman Gadir, the prominent businessman who founded the group. “We’re going to take all the weapons from people and turn them over to the local council.”

In Tripoli, neighborhood committees and religious groups in several districts are asking – and, at times, forcing – residents to register their weapons in exchange for homemade plastic badges that serve as gun permits at checkpoints set up by local men or former rebels who’ve returned from fighting.

Sometimes the groups act in coordination with semi-official military councils, but more often the efforts are overseen by individual community figures or militia commanders acting on requests from residents who are fed up with the sound of random shooting and fatal accidents involving children who stumble upon caches.

“We’re going to try to negotiate and take the weapons peacefully, but if they don’t give them up, we’ll just break into houses and confiscate them,” said Abdel Raouf Kara, the leader of a revolutionary brigade from the hard-hit neighborhood of Suq al Jumaa.

Am I the only one who gets a little nervous about the chances of democracy surviving during the “Arab/African spring” when a “revolutionary brigade” promises to break down doors and confiscate guns from civilians?

The Miami Herald doesn’t even consider the possibility that perhaps it would be a good idea for Libyans to remain armed, so that they can’t be forced into another brutal dictatorship. I mean, what are the odds, right?

Many Americans take their security and freedoms for granted. They don’t spend five minutes wondering how this country came to be the way it is. So when the left preaches that Big Government is the key to their safety, security and prosperity, it seems credible. Libya offers a teachable moment about Wayne’s truism about firearms and rule-making and what happens next (as does even a casual reading of Chairman Mao’s strategy).

And no one’s listening. Which just goes to show the true importance of the Second Amendment.