The fight is far from over

Gun rights supporters can definitely breathe a sigh of relief. The Assault Weapons Ban of 2013 bill introduced by Senator Feinstein is out of the picture. For now.

This does not mean we can let our guard down. Far from it. There are plenty more parliamentary tricks that the Democrats can play to get what they want through the door. Namely the back door. They will continue to demonize gun owners and continue to assert that the blood of the Sandy Hook children and the Aurora theatre victims is on our hands.

Feinstein had been working on that bill for over a year before introducing it. The aftermath of the Sandy Hook massacre was prime opportunity for her to introduce it, trying to use the blood of dead children to score political points. Despicable. And she had to have known that there were going to be reservations among the senior Democrats in the Senate, let alone the House, with trying to get that through. Many of them were around when her initial AWB was signed into law in 1994, and they remember what happened: the Republicans swept elections in both the House and Senate.

Feinstein has also said numerous times that she doesn’t want to stop with "assault weapons". She didn’t want to stop with them back in 1994 either. Her goal is and always has been a full-out ban of all privately-owned firearms:

If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them; "Mr. and Mrs. America, turn ’em all in," I would have done it.

Now one idiot tried to claim in a YouTube comment that Feinstein was only referring to assault weapons without taking into account that Feinstein made these statements after the 1994 AWB was signed into law. But that’s not the only thing she’s said that shows her true goal with regard to guns and the Second Amendment:

Banning guns addresses a fundamental right of all Americans to feel safe.

But the battle for gun rights is far from over. Not when there are politicians in power or seeking power with a political goal of seeing guns banned in the United States.

While attempting to enact sweeping gun legislation has proven in the past to be political suicide – except for politicians like Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, that is – that won’t stop them from trying to go after gun rights. Their next move will be to take Feinstein’s bill and break it apart. From the pieces they will construct amendments and riders to be introduced to bills that would be politically risky for Republicans to oppose, such as the Department of Defense Appropriations Act of 2013, introduced as S.444 and currently in the Senate Appropriations Committee. Such a move will give them some political leverage which they will use to try to score political points.

And while the assault weapons ban might be out – for now – the magazine limitation might still be in play. And that would have far more devastating effects than the assault weapons ban ever could. This is especially true since Feinstein’s bill defines "large capacity ammunition feeding devices" as a

magazine, belt, drum, feed strip, or similar device, including any such device joined or coupled with another in any manner, that has an overall capacity of, or that can be readily restored, changed, or converted to accept, more than 10 rounds of ammunition

and further declares that

It shall be unlawful for a person to import, sell, manufacture, transfer, or possess, in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce, a large capacity ammunition feeding device.

And it exempts the government and law enforcement, but requires that all "high capacity" magazines made for law enforcement or the military to have a serial number. And also in compliance with the Constitution’s prohibition on ex post facto laws, the bill would also exempt the possession of "large capacity" magazines existing before the enactment of the legislation.

But all of that discussion is immaterial in the face of the possibility of the President going from President to dictator by using his executive order privilege to enact the magazine capacity limitation among other things. In other words, giving Congress a chance to give him what he wants before he does it himself.

By no means is the fight over. There are very dedicated people wanting to see the Second Amendment eviscerated.

We have to continue to be vigilant, because they will continue to be just as vigilant.