Hillary's alternative to repealing the Second Amendment

From: Response Action Network

18 August 2016


Democrats and the Clinton presidential campaign have pushed back on the idea that, if elected, Mrs. Clinton would seek to either repeal or severely curtail the Second Amendment.

Despite the fever dreams of some anti-gun advocates, we've always thought an outright repeal would go nowhere. But making guns scarce, and ownership rare, isn't as difficult as one might think (link is external), given the right political circumstances:

Hillary Clinton has made it clear that her “death blow” against the Second Amendment won’t be an attempt to repeal the Second Amendment directly, but to instead drive the gun industry itself out of business.

The weapon she has chosen to attack you human right to self defense is the repeal of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, or PLCAA.

Clinton has attacked PLCAA repeatedly on the campaign trail, and—lying about it shamelessly—claiming that it grants the firearms industry “immunity” from lawsuits.

This claim is entirely false, which Clinton well knows (link is external).

PLCAA does one thing, and one thing only: it protects the firearms industry from frivolous lawsuits filed by gun control supporters looking to bankrupt gun dealers and gun companies.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the Brady Campaign (former called the National Council to Control Handguns and Handgun Control, Inc.) used deep-pocketed gun control supporters to finance what was known as “lawfare.”

Anti-gun attorneys would look for people to use as patsies to serve as plaintiffs in frivolous civil lawsuits against gun dealers, distributors, and manufacturers. The goal of these suits were always transparent, and always the same. These gun control supporters didn’t really care if they won or lost their cases, or if their plaintiff patsies were ripped to emotional shreds; their goal was then (and remains now) to force gun dealers, distributors, and manufacturers to have to hire expensive attorneys and spend hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in legal fees to defend themselves in court.

PLCAA was passed into law specifically to keep a handful of gun control supporting billionaires from bankrupting the American gun industry from top to bottom with frivolous lawsuits. Hillary Clinton wants to repeal PLCAA so that her allies, such as Michael Bloomberg, can then finance wave after wave of lawsuits to bankrupt gun companies with exorbitant legal fees.

If Clinton is successful in her goal of repealing PLCAA—which she could very conceivably do if she is elected in a “wave” that sees Democrats pick up seats in the House and Senate—then no gun dealer or manufacturer, or sporting goods store, or ammunition company, would be immune to frivolous lawsuits, and all would be sued out of business.

You would not be able to buy new guns, because there would be no manufacturers or importers after they were targeted, one-by-one.

In many states where universal background checks are required, you would not be able to buy, sell, or trade existing guns, as dealer after dealer would be sued out of business.

You would not be able to buy ammunition for your existing guns, as ammunition companies would also be targeted for extermination, as Brady tried to do against Lucky Gunner as recently as last year (only to have their case struck down by a judge citing PLCAA (link is external)).

The return of lawfare against gun manufacturers? It's not out of the question. We would still think, and work to ensure, current legislation preventing such actions remained in place.

But it's best to be aware of, and prepared for, such possibilities.


God bless,
JohnnyD