At least, the dispute over the Obama/Biden attack on our Second Amendment rights is certainly hot and getting hotter by the minute. I won’t even bother going into the basically treasonous assault on the rights of gun owners in New York State by fascist Andrew Cuomo or the hot air blown strongly in New York City by contemptible weasel cum mayor Michael Bloomberg.

With Texas and Wyoming (so far!) working on legislation to illegalize federal interference with gun rights in their states, a sheriff in Oregon declaring that his county will not acknowledge any new federal anti-gun legislation and gun rights advocacies fighting the feds every step of the way, this issue is certainly going to continue getting hotter…

As Bonehead Biden epitomized the selective policies of liberalism (whatever suits their agendas of the moment),

During the National Rifle Association’s meeting with Vice President Joe Biden and the White House gun violence task force, the vice president said the Obama administration does not have the time to fully enforce existing gun laws.

Jim Baker, the NRA representative present at the meeting, recalled the vice president’s words during an interview with The Daily Caller: “And to your point, Mr. Baker, regarding the lack of prosecutions on lying on Form 4473s, we simply don’t have the time or manpower to prosecute everybody who lies on a form, that checks a wrong box, that answers a question inaccurately.”

What kind of a crock is that, coming, no less, from the White House?

And from One News Now

Lawmakers and gun advocates are sounding off on President Obama’s 23 executive actions involving gun violence, as well as the dozen or so actions that he has called on Congress to approve.

Obama is taking 23 separate actions on his own, using his presidential powers, but says it is up to Congress to “make a real and lasting difference” by imposing new gun restrictions. His proposals, introduced Wednesday in the nation’s capital, include universal background checks and bans on military-style assault rifles. But he acknowledged he faces a tough fight to get those measures approved on Capitol Hill.

Indeed he might. Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) appeared Wednesday afternoon on Tony Perkins’ Washington Watch on American Family Radio. The senator has issues with the approach being taken by the president.

“My concern still is whether or not he is going to usurp this authority and do it on his own,” said Paul. “We set up a country with checks and balances [because] we didn’t like the king to have all the balance of power — so we separated the power. In fact, one of the people we based this on was the writings of Montesquieu. He said it was very important to do this, or else you will have tyranny.”

Obama, said the Kentucky Republican, “has shown a tendency to go around Congress when he can’t get his way — and that worries me.”

And that is why Senator Paul plans to take some legislative action. “We’ll be introducing some legislation to try to rein in his authority to do things by executive order. That’ll be coming by the next week or so,” he stated. “We’ll also be looking very carefully at these executive orders to see if any of them go afoul of the Second Amendment.”

Appearing on the Fox News Channel this morning, Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida) called the president’s actions “misguided.”

“Here’s my point: the impetus for all of this is the shooting in Connecticut, right? That’s what led to this — and yet nothing he’s proposing would have prevented Connecticut,” said Rubio.

“… It appears to me[that] this is stuff they’ve always wanted to do, and now this [tragedy] has created the political climate to pursue it — and it’s not going to solve the problem,” . Washington, DC, had some of the strictest gun laws in the country, and when they passed them violence skyrocketed.”

Texas Governor Rick Perry (R) agrees with Rubio, saying “very few of his recommendations have anything to do with happened” in Connecticut.

“Guns require a finger to pull the trigger,” Perry says in a press release. “The sad young man who did that in Newtown was clearly haunted by demons and no gun law could have saved the children in Sandy Hook Elementary from his terror.”

He adds: “… The piling on by the political left, and their cohorts in the media, to use the massacre of little children to advance a pre-existing political agenda that would not have saved those children, disgusts me, personally. The Second Amendment to the Constitution is a basic right of free people and cannot be nor will it be abridged by the executive power of this or any other president.”

Egregious issues

A gun rights organization also is skeptical about President Obama’s 23 executive actions aimed at curbing gun rights. Sam Paredes is on the board of directors of Gun Owners of America.

“[The executive actions] would do nothing to impact crime, nothing to stop murders, nothing to stop the criminally insane from committing their atrocities,” he tells OneNewsNow. “So we are very skeptical and are prepared to challenge them any way we can, whether it’s in Congress or through the courts.”

Paredes and GOA feel several of the president’s proposals that were particularly egregious. “The so-called assault weapons ban and the high-capacity magazine ban; the mandatory background checks for all purchases — we think that those issues are the most egregious; a clear violation of the Second Amendment.”

Paredes says it is fortunate that Obama will not be able to put those severe restrictions in place without congressional approval.

We must now hope that the politicians quoted in the above article do something highly uncharacteristic of GOP politicians of late: Follow through, stick to their guns (pun intended) and show some real spine by beating back this blatant assault on the rights guaranteed us by our Constitution, instead of just offering up the usual bluster to pacify their constituents and then giving in to the forces of the left.

It should be quite clear by now that the Wolf household is a very Second Amendment household. Our two sons knew how to shoot (accurately) both a variety of rifles and several handguns very early on, and before either was allowed to handle his first firearm, he was well versed in firearm safety.

That said, I couldn’t resist posting this one:

If this isn’t the best rejoinder ever, it has to rank among the top two or three. Talk about a conversation stopper.

For those that don’t know him, Major General Peter Cosgrove is an ‘Australian treasure!’

General Cosgrove was interviewed on the radio recently.

Read his reply to the lady who interviewed him concerning guns and children.

Regardless of how you feel about gun laws you gotta love this!

This is one of the best comeback lines of all time.

It is a portion of an ABC radio interview between a female broadcaster and General Cosgrove who was about to sponsor a Boy Scout Troop visiting his military headquarters.

FEMALE INTERVIEWER:
So, General Cosgrove, what things are you going to teach these young boys when they visit your base?

GENERAL COSGROVE:
We’re going to teach them climbing, canoeing, archery and shooting.

FEMALE INTERVIEWER:
Shooting! That’s a bit irresponsible, isn’t it?

GENERAL COSGROVE:
I don’t see why, they’ll be properly supervised on the rifle range.

FEMALE INTERVIEWER:

Don’t you admit that this is a terribly dangerous activity to be teaching children?

GENERAL COSGROVE:
I don’t see how. We will be teaching them proper rifle discipline before they even touch a firearm.

FEMALE INTERVIEWER:
But you’re equipping them to become violent killers.

GENERAL COSGROVE:
Well, Ma’am, you’re equipped to be a prostitute, but you’re not one, are you?

The radiocast went silent for 46 seconds and when it returned, the interview was over.

LOL!

Another H/T to Ric…

Try robbing this diner!

H/T Ric

From Vision To America:

A Republican state lawmaker in Wyoming has introduced legislation to prohibit enforcement of federal gun control measures that Vice President Joe Biden is likely to recommend next week.

State Rep. Kendell Kroeker (R-Evansville) has put forward a bill making it a felony to enforce in Wyoming any federal ban on assault weapons or high-capacity gun magazines, two proposals that Biden’s gun control task force is likely to present to President Barack Obama on Tuesday. The task force’s recommendations, of course, would have to be passed by Congress and signed by Obama in order to become law.

Kroeker said his bill, which would hit federal agents with up to five years in prison and a $50,000 fine for attempting to enforce such bans in Wyoming, is designed to be proactive in preserving gun rights.

Emphasis mine.

What a splendid way to keep Herr Obama’s Anti-Second Amendment Gestapo out of ones’ state!

Executive orders were not meant to provide a president with designs on monarchy a way to realize his dreams via a vehicle by which he could ignore the House, the Senate and the Court and simply dictate his personal doctrine, via whim, to the American people.

Yet, here we have a president who is doing just that, cranking out an executive order whenever he is not satisfied with the dictates of the Constitution or the legalities of United States governance.

As we know, President Obama is purportedly preparing another one of his executive order specials to step on the Second Amendment without consideration of any possible interference from those pesky members of the other branches of government.

A Washington Times article by Andrew Napolitano pretty much defines the issue.

The right of the people to keep and bear arms is an extension of the natural right to self-defense and a hallmark of personal sovereignty. It is specifically insulated from governmental interference by the Constitution and has historically been the linchpin of resistance to tyranny. Yet the progressives in both political parties stand ready to use the coercive power of the government to interfere with the exercise of that right by law-abiding persons because of the gross abuse of that right by some crazies in our midst.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, he was marrying the nation at its birth to the ancient principles of the natural law that have animated the Judeo-Christian tradition in the West. Those principles have operated as a brake on all governments that recognize them by enunciating the concept of natural rights.

As we have been created in the image and likeness of God the Father, we are perfectly free just as He is. Thus, the natural law teaches that our freedoms are pre-political and come from our humanity and not from the government. As our humanity is ultimately divine in origin, the government, even by majority vote, cannot morally take natural rights away from us. A natural right is an area of individual human behavior — like thought, speech, worship, travel, self-defense, privacy, ownership and use of property, consensual personal intimacy — immune from government interference and for the exercise of which we don’t need the government’s permission.

SNIP!

The principal reason the colonists won the American Revolution is that they possessed weapons equivalent in power and precision to those of the British government. If the colonists had been limited to crossbows that they had registered with the king’s government in London, while the British troops used gunpowder when they fought us here, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would have been captured and hanged.

We also defeated the king’s soldiers because they didn’t know who among us was armed, because there was no requirement of a permission slip from the government in order to exercise the right to self-defense. (Imagine the howls of protest if permission were required as a precondition to exercising the freedom of speech.) Today, the limitations on the power and precision of the guns we can lawfully own not only violate our natural right to self-defense and our personal sovereignties, they assure that a tyrant can more easily disarm and overcome us.

The historical reality of the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to keep and bear arms is not that it protects the right to shoot deer. It protects the right to shoot tyrants, and it protects the right to shoot at them effectively, with the same instruments they would use upon us. If the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto had had the firepower and ammunition that the Nazis had, some of Poland might have stayed free and more persons would have survived the Holocaust.

Above emphasis mine.

Read the entire piece, it’s as good a pro-Second Amendment article as I’ve seen in the course of this latest attempt by the left to deprive us of one of our most basic rights.

This is another from Seth’s video archives, a bit of his favorite opera in which he and I both seem to have different icons. His is Maria Ewing (I wonder why) while my favorite here is Gino Quilico, who appears below as Escamillo.

Maria Ewing is the woman in red (Carmen).

Also more than noteable here is soprano Judith Howarth, who plays Frasquita, one of the two bar girls, and whom you see singing that high note near the end of the song.

The only drawback is that it’s in French (the cloud to an otherwise purely silver lining), but the singing and indeed the harmonies are incredible.

Yesterday I began reading Mark Steyn’s new book, After America Get Ready for Armageddon, and like everything Steyn writes, it’s like horses coming out the gate at the Kentucky Derby, grabbing your attention and hanging on from the first word.

It’s a perfect follow-up to America Alone, which he wrote a few years ago, and so far very much worth the read.

This is a writer who has a total grasp of the realities of where our country is heading, and he breaks everything down with his usual humorous twist — in the reviews on the book, Ann Coulter sums it up perfectly when she writes that “Only Mark Steyn can write about the decline of America and leave you laughing.”

I’m already more than halfway through and will probably have finished it by late tonight or early tomorrow, and thus far what I’ve read makes me recommend it completely.

From Seth’s music archives.

Does anybody remember a great British group called YES?

Seth’s interim post hit the nail right on the head, reflecting all our thoughts here at Hard Astarboard.

On the same token, we all agree on one thing, and that is that of all the PACs and PAC oriented organizations purporting to fight for our rights, the single one we can always count on to keep their nose to the grindstone and remain ever vigilant on our behalf is the National Rifle Association.

To that end, whatever else happens in the red light district of politics, we will not neglect to remind readers of the importance of our Second Amendment rights.

That said, a letter that’s making the rounds, from an eight year United States Marine to Senator Dianne Feinstein regarding that leftie legislator’s war on American gun ownership, appears at The Blaze.

Senator Dianne Feinstein,

I will not register my weapons should this bill be passed, as I do not believe it is the government’s right to know what I own. Nor do I think it prudent to tell you what I own so that it may be taken from me by a group of people who enjoy armed protection yet decry me having the same a crime. You ma’am have overstepped a line that is not your domain. I am a Marine Corps Veteran of 8 years, and I will not have some woman who proclaims the evil of an inanimate object, yet carries one, tell me I may not have one.

I am not your subject. I am the man who keeps you free. I am not your servant. I am the person whom you serve. I am not your peasant. I am the flesh and blood of America.

I am the man who fought for my country. I am the man who learned. I am an American. You will not tell me that I must register my semi-automatic AR-15 because of the actions of some evil man.

I will not be disarmed to suit the fear that has been established by the media and your misinformation campaign against the American public.

We, the people, deserve better than you.

Respectfully Submitted,
Joshua Boston
Cpl,
United States Marine Corps
2004-2012

Those are our sentiments, exactly….