[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvrwsZwL5vE[/youtube]
This video has been going around the blog world lately and people are saying “Bill O’Reilly supports gun confiscations during weather emergencies OMG OMG WTF”. Not once does he say that in the video, he simply asks questions that would imply he supports the idea.
Comments
25 responses to “Bill O’Reilly on Gun Confiscation During Weather Emergencies”
Bill O’Reilly is a stooge. The last line is hilarious, when he calls opposing a suspension of the constitution “extreme”.
Nearly the whole constitution has been gutted by the supreme court, it’s nice to cling to what’s left though.
This guy didn’t want to address the issue of curfews during a state of emergency; isn’t that as big a constitutional crisis as weapons? He asserts that it doesn’t say anywhere in the constitution that bad weather suspends the constitution. I don’t believe it says anywhere that an arrest for domestic violence suspends 2nd amendment rights either, but that’ll get your firearms taken away. Oh yeah, that’s because freedoms can be taken away by due process – like declaring a state of emergency in an area and banning firearms.
It sounds like he just wants to start trouble by picking and choosing to understand only the parts of the constitution and legal process that he agrees with. Who wants to bet that he doesn’t cry foul when the constitutional rights of a terror suspect are suspended, with or without the benefit of due process of law? He probably supports keeping guns out of the hands of convicted criminals too, though the 2nd amendment doesn’t mention that.
I agree with Ty, though – O’Reilly is a stooge. Of the two stooges in the video though, I’m going to have to side with him on this one.
Wow. I just lost any respect I had left for O’Reilly. The Constitution is not subject to the whims of an “emergency situation.”
I should clarify that statement I made earlier a little. I certainly don’t agree that just because there’s a natural disaster that weapons should be confiscated. But, in extreme circumstances, I would stand by the decision to disallow weapons in a population dense, urban area like New Orleans. He comes off as if he’s saying there is never any justification to disallow weapons in an area, and that he’ll oppose, with force, any attempt to disarm. It sounds like a pretty dangerous sentiment.
It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy to justify to my self why I should give up my rights.
Josh, King George declared the colonies to be in a state of rebellion. Under the law, the Founders were obligated to hand over all arms and ammunition. Why didn’t they? Because “all men… are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” -Declaration of Independence.
Natural Rights come from God, you have them simply by breathing. Men did not give them to us and men cannot take them away. The only Constitutional provision for denying a man his Rights is through “due process of law”, for committing crimes.
Go ahead and bring up public safety. “You can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater!” You know what else you can’t do? You can’t discharge a shotgun in a public theater or in the mall. We already have both written and common law in place to protect people from that. Public safety is taken care of.
If I follow along with your logic here – We already have laws in place that make it illegal to unjustifiably shoot another human being, so any laws that make it illegal to take a weapon on an airplane, into a school, etc. are unnecessary. In fact, we don’t need to prevent domestic abusers from possessing weapons either, because it is already illegal to unjustifiably shoot someone!
Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t support the idea of the government coming in and confiscating weapons for no reason. I don’t support the way that they did that in New Orleans. But I understand the need, in extreme circumstances, to restrict freedom in order to preserve order. I don’t have a problem in a situation like New Orleans after the hurricane with the local authorities saying, “There is a curfew and no one is allowed to have weapons out in public.” They could do that without coming in to peoples’ homes and confiscating weapons.
I think what O’Reilly was getting at with this guy is his “they’re not taking my guns without a fight” attitude. He doesn’t seem to recognize the authority or need for local authorities to enact restrictions to maintain order in times of extreme hardship or emergency. We all have rights, but sometimes it becomes necessary in extreme circumstances to recognize the need to make some temporary concessions in order to maintain civility and order. If everyone could be trusted to obey those written and common laws that are in place to protect people there would be far fewer issues with public safety. Clearly we can’t always trust everyone to do the proper thing.
You follow my logic perfectly. We don’t seem to have any problems with selling gasoline to anyone with a container, even though gasoline is a deadly weapon all by itself. A bulletproof vest, locking your front door or employing security guards- none of these things will do much to protect you from Molotov cocktail attacks. Yet the laws in place against murder, assault with a deadly weapon and arson work fine without strict regulation of the weapon itself.
I don’t support the idea of government coming in to confiscate weapons belonging to someone who hasn’t committed a crime for ANY REASON. Take guns away from women in a lawless place like post-Katrina New Orleans and how will you protect them from rapists? Confiscation is not only immoral, it is impractical.
If you can give up a Right at all (I’m not sure you can), you could only do it voluntarily. The interview subject’s attitude was one of justified righteous indignation. The woman tackled to the ground in the video they showed was attempting to comply with Law Enforcement Officers’ instructions and she was still assaulted. I don’t feel the urge to make life easy on thugs enforcing unConstitutional edicts, why would I?
People breaking laws is a fact of life. The question at hand is simple: When a looter breaks the law and enters an occupied dwelling, should the residents have the tools to repel the invader? The only people who benefit from gun control are the criminals.
I think we’re at least partially on the same page. I follow you logic, but disagree with your conclusion. The laws against murder or assault with a deadly weapon don’t work fine without regulation of the weapon. I think restricting domestic abusers or convicted criminals from legally owning firearms saves lives (they can still get them, but making it more difficult helps). I believe that laws against murder are insufficient to keep a terrorist from boarding a plane with a firearm; thankfully firearms aren’t allowed on flights.
Let me reiterate – I don’t think weapons should be confiscated. But restrictions to keep people from taking firearms outside their homes during a state of emergency don’t seem unreasonable. Actions by police like those shown in the video are wildly inappropriate and go far beyond what is reasonable and necessary to maintain order. You and I can agree on that.
As was stated in the article, O’Reilly doesn’t at any time say that he supports gun confiscations. I think he just seemed to be expressing a little disbelief that the interviewee wouldn’t concede that in times of emergencies some additional restrictions (such as those on weapons and curfews) are necessary.
Yes, Josh, they do. It is not the tool, it is the user. I can tighten a screw, or I can stab you, with a screwdriver. I can participate in the great American sport by hitting a baseball, or I can beat your brains out, with a baseball bat.
It is not the tool, it is how one uses the tool.
In response to this and your comments below:
If the laws making an act legal were sufficient to prevent people from committing those acts, which is what the argument was, then why, pray tell, do there continue to be murders, rapes, robberies, etc.?
The idea I disagreed with was: “We already have both written and common law in place to protect people from that [illegal use of a firearm]. Public safety is taken care of.” If this were true, then yes, there would be no need to regulate guns because no one would ever use them to commit a crime. Likewise, there would be no need for guns for self defense, because there would be no crime to defend against.
Is this really what you believe? That there should be no restrictions or regulations on guns and who can possess them? We should just allow anyone to have them? Mentally unstable, convicted felons, etc.? And no restrictions on where they can be taken? Schools? Airplanes? Shall we deregulate explosives as well? Are laws against a terrorist bombing sufficient to dissuade a would-be terrorist from building and setting off a bomb?
You are correct; it is not the gun that harms someone, it is the person wielding the gun. But if you can keep a gun out of a criminal’s hand, they can’t use it to commit a crime. It’s an extraordinarily simple concept. Now I’m not saying that making it illegal for a felon to possess a gun will keep him from doing so; I’ve already asserted that having something written into law won’t keep people from disobeying it. But it’s foolproof that if an abusive husband NEVER has a gun in his hands, he can NEVER use a gun to kill his wife. It’s 100% guaranteed that it just couldn’t happen. Never use crack cocaine = no chance of becoming addicted to crack cocaine. Never let a terrorist on an airplane = no possibility of a terrorist hijacking an airplane.
If you are so naïve to think that items such as guns, or any other dangerous device/substance don’t need to be regulated because laws that prohibit using them to harm others are enough to stop them from doing so, then I think it is you who needs to stand down and let the grown-ups talk.
I think that teh wrong tools are being used in this theory for prevention. The punishment for commiting the crime(s) should be the prevention, and the law should be there to deal with a person, if by lack of their own self control, they commit an act on another person.
No manner of amount nor ferocity of the law will change the human condition.
I guess with me at least, it comes back to the “Enforce a few laws, instead of making tons of them and doing nothing”.
That is EXACTLY how I feel as well.
“We all have rights, but sometimes it becomes necessary in extreme circumstances to recognize the need to make some temporary concessions in order to maintain civility and order.”
– Josh
“Anyone who would trade their freedom for safety
deserves neither freedom or safety.”
– Benjamin Franklin
In the event of a “State of Emergency” where the authorities cannot control the people, how are the police or national guard supposed to protect law abiding citizens from those who wish to rob and rape them?
“The laws that forbid the carrying of arms …. disarm only
those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.
Such laws make things worse for the assaulted
and better for the assailants. They serve rather to encourage
than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be
attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”
– Thomas Jefferson
@Josh
This is totally beside the point, but in your first post you called Curfews as big a Constitutional issue as confiscating weapons. Confiscating weapons is explicitly prohibited by the Bill of Rights, you don’t need to be much of a Constitutional scholar to understand that. Since curfews are not mentioned in the Constitution it seems reasonable to me that someone who is not a Constitutional scholar to decline to comment on that issue.
Josh the Vet-
You pointed out earlier that men are “endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights…” (from the Declaration of Independence). Among those rights are – life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I’d say the ability to move about freely (not subject to a curfew) falls within the category of “liberty.” The ninth amendment to the Constitution provides that, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
The interviewee has a law degree from Yale. I think he’s perfectly capable of commenting on the constitutionality of curfews as well as firearms confiscations.
Here’s my bottom line if I haven’t made it sufficiently clear:
I disagree with the way things were handled after Katrina. I disagree with going door to door confiscating the weapons of citizens who might need them to protect themselves.
However, I disagree with this guy’s attitude insofar as he seems to project that he and his group will refuse to follow orders during a declared emergency if they don’t agree with those orders. And it’s hard to take him very seriously when he won’t even recognize the severity of the situation in New Orleans – the crime, looting, inability to maintain civil control – and instead refers to the aftermath of the hurricane as “bad weather.” Authorities were not confiscating weapons (which, again, I don’t agree with) because of “bad weather,” they were trying to regain control of a massive urban area after one of the most devastating natural disasters in recent history.
The guy he O’Rieley was interviewing was a dunce.
He should have immediately made the point that when there’s a disaster, when social order is breaking down, when there’s looting, when the public services are stretched to the breaking point, is when it is least appropriate to disarm the law abiding.
Josh the Vet,
Don’t wast your time. Some people are just mental midgets and have some perverted fear of individual freedom. This fear seems to always manifest its self in attacks on law abiding citizens to give them self a false sense of security.
@Josh- as you and Owen both mentioned, the government was not in control of New Orleans. There was no 911 to call (with a reasonable expectation of a timely response). It being the case that citizens cannot expect protection from their governments, the responsibility for protecting themselves returns to the individual. Removing the firearm is to self defense (an extension of the Right to Life) as removing printing presses are to the Rights of Free Speech and the Press. The Constitution SPECIFICALLY PROHIBITS this action. No exceptions are made for emergencies of any kind.
As for the Soldiers, police and other members of the Oath Keepers declaration of principles, they say they will refuse to follow orders that contradict the Constitution, not “if they don’t agree with those orders”. Soldiers swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States first and everything else second, as it should be.
Orders that violate the Constitution are unlawful, the same way that orders to commit murder are. Refusing to obey unlawful orders is a duty of all Soldiers, not just the members of a particular organization.
@Phil- Even if Josh doesn’t want to listen to reason, a third party reading this will see his arguments and mine. If they have any Constitutional conscience or critical thinking abilities I am confident that they will independently evaluate and agree with my positions. That can only be a good thing. If no one reads this at all, at least I got some mental exercise. Doing pushups is never a waste of time- doing just one pushup will make you stronger tomorrow than if you hadn’t.
@Jared- When arguing with a Socialist, you should never start by arguing whether free markets are more efficient than a centrally planned economy. If he can bring to bear some bullshit research that you can’t refute, you may stalemate or lose. Instead, the first argument to bring up is morality. All you have to prove in the moral argument is that men are not slaves- if men are free they alone own their bodies, their labor and the fruits of their labor. By establishing that simple chain you deny the Socialist’s claim to tax free men, ending in an easy win for you.
A good analogy would be discussing the most efficient way to rob a bank. Fuck methods, techniques or tactics- the robber has no moral claim to thatr money and should be despised without any regard to his “efficiency” or how happy he is with the result.
Everyone have a good night.
In your earlier argument you say, “…You can’t discharge a shotgun in a public theater or in the mall. We already have both written and common law in place to protect people from that. Public safety is taken care of.”
The logical conclusion is that the citizens of New Orleans (or anywhere else) don’t need guns to protect themselves, nor do they need protection from the government, because things like murder, rape, robbery, etc. are already illegal. Likewise, the “Oath Keepers” oath to disobey the orders that they see as unlawful is unnecessary because its members, or those it would like to have as its members, already have a duty to disobey unlawful orders. It seems that your position is simply that everyone should be able to have a gun anywhere, any time, no matter what the circumstances. I see you’ve posted elsewhere that there’s nothing in the 2nd amendment about banning felons from owning firearms. If an action being made illegal was sufficient to prevent someone from doing it, we wouldn’t have felons in the first place, and that would also be sufficient to keep them from committing any crime with a gun. Again, your claim that people need guns to protect themselves falls apart based on your claim that written and common law are already in place to protect people (and are sufficient to do so).
I consider this entire discussion more of an exercise in writing and argument construction and analysis more than anything. I invite people to read and apply critical thinking skills to this as well. I think if they do they’ll see that the basis of my argument is not that I support confiscating people weapons, but rather that I disagree with Stewart Rhodes and am appalled (I think as Bill O’Reilly was) that he refuses to recognize a declared state of emergency, and continued to assert that the local authorities were confiscating weapons merely due to bad weather.
Enough of this discussion though…
Since when does the Constitution become extreme? What is “extreme?” At JSU in Jackson, MS, in a gun free zone, a professor was shot twice before being pistol whipped in a parking lot. Was that “extreme?”
I would say barring citizens from carrying weapons anywhere is “extreme.” I am just waiting for some liberal fanatic to get assaulted and then turn into a pro gun/pro Constitution zealot. I think Al Sharpton would be awesome in that regard.
By the way, make sure you have enough fuel, food, water, and other necessities, not just the latest M-4 with taticool stuff on it.
Josh. Read my reply above. The reason for the 2A to the Constitution is exactly what you feel to be perfectly acceptable. On that note, go back to your leftist enclave and stop bothering the grown-ups.
One more small detail. Yes murder is illegal. And the murderer, if caught, should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But wouldn’t it be better to prevent the murder of an innocent in the first place? In order to do that, and not just investigate the reason for the chalk lines, you must be able to overcome the criminal attack.
@Josh- When I said that having laws against the hazardous discharge of weapons protects people, I was arguing that using laws to regulate where you can have a gun are superfluous. If a person is willing to break laws against Assault and Murder, having a “gun free zone” or during a “state of emergency” will disarm them victim as well as… no, BETTER than it disarms the Felon.
The position that “everyone should be able to have a gun anywhere, any time” is soundly reflected in the phrase “the Right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Some pretty smart guys wrote that phrase and in their wisdom they chose to make no exceptions for executive declarations of emergencies. They had just lived through an emergency themselves and with perfect hindsight they decided that disarming the citizenry for any reason should not be allowed.
As for why the founding members of the Oath Keepers felt the need to make an organization devoted to uniform resistance against illegal orders, it probably has somethin to do with how many federal law enforcement agents have been OBEYING illegal orders in the last twenty years. That’s my guess.