As the gavel falls on the end of the 2013 legislative session in Iowa many are wondering what was lost and what was gained this year.
Well buckle up, this will be a multi-part report on the highs and the lows of the 2013 legislative session. We’ll pull no punches and let you know who was great, awful, and downright two faced when it comes to the 2nd Amendment in Iowa this legislative session.
The Context:
Of course, the 2013 legislative session was defined before it even began by the events of Newtown, Connecticut where a criminal mad-man opened fire in a school killing over two dozen children and adults.
The Connecticut shooting followed on the heels of the summer time shooting in Aurora, Colorado where a gunman killed 12 people in a movie theatre.
Both of these shootings, as well as other, lesser known public shootings from 2012 like the Portland, Oregon mall shooting all had one thing in common: they all occurred in so-called “Gun Free Zones.”
That is, they all occurred in areas where guns were already prohibited.
They all occurred in areas where murder is already prohibited.
They all occurred in areas where law abiding citizens were statutorily prohibited from being able to defend themselves against criminals and mad men.
But gun-grabbers have never used facts and logic to make their allegations and arguments.
The anti-gun reaction was as swift as it was scripted: before the blood was even dry from Newtown, billionaire New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg began screaming for gun control to anyone who would listen.
Bloomberg was joined by a who’s who gaggle of gun control groups including the Brady Campaign, Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, and Mayors Against Illegal Gun Coalition, all demanding that the President take immediate action.
And people did listen.
The leftist media, nationwide, began an incessant clamor for gun control that was recycled with virtually every top-of-the-hour news cycle that went on during the weeks following Newtown.
On January 16, just days after the start of the Iowa General Assembly President Obama held a press conference announcing his desire to see:
• Universal background checks (aka Universal Registration of all firearms).
• A permanent ban on “assault weapons” (aka virtually all modern rifles that have modern cosmetic features).
• A complete ban on magazines holding more than 10 rounds.
It was a dark day.
As this was happening at the Federal level, things in Iowa were looking rather grim too.
On December 29, 2012, the Des Moines Register’s Donald Kaul published an editorial in which he called for violence against legislators who didn’t agree with his rabid, anti-gun agenda saying,
“I would tie Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, our esteemed Republican leaders, to the back of a Chevy pickup truck and drag them around a parking lot until they saw the light on gun control . . . And if that didn’t work, I’d adopt radical measures.”
Naturally if you or I called for violence against anti-gun politicians we’d be investigated and likely arrested for making terroristic threats, but when the liberal media does it its considered “protected speech.”
The Des Moines Register continued this mantra for months running feature stories with half-baked surveys and ridiculous assertions on their front page seemingly every day.
As all this was going on, Iowa State Representative Dan Muhlbauer (D-Manilla) came out with an outrageous interview that many refused to believe was true.
Muhlbauer was very clear in his agenda: he wanted to BAN and CONFISCATE all semi-automatic weapons in the state of Iowa.
Understand what this meant.
He wanted to ban virtually every firearm in the state! Hanging on to your AR15 was the least of your worries as Muhlbauer wanted to ban your little .22 squirrel hunting rifle, your wife’s Glock 19 self-defense pistol, and your Remington 11-87 hunting shotgun!
We were stunned when we read his proposals.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, Mulbauer went on. You see, he didn’t just want to ban future sales of these weapons – he wanted to take the ones you currently own as well saying,
“Even if you have them, I think we need to start taking them…We can’t have those out there. Because if they’re out there they’re just going to get circulated around to the wrong people. Those guns should not be in the public’s hands.”
We’ve always know this to be the anti-gunners ultimate agenda, we were just shocked to hear it stated publicly!
Many third-world dictators don’t even go this far when it comes to regulating the rights of their ‘subjects’ around the world.
As we walked into the Capitol for the first time in January, this was the mood we were confronted with.
President Obama, Vice President Biden, almost all of the national media, the Des Moines Register, Iowa House Democrats – all of them were lining up to make sure that our way of life was regulated out of existence this year – and even the normally more pro-gun members of the General Assembly were beginning to run scared.
The session was about to begin!
For Freedom,
Aaron Dorr
Executive Director
P.S. Part 2 of the year in review will be coming out shortly so stay tuned.