Oh, go ahead. Just guess. We’ll spot you a couple of vowels, to move this thing along.
Hillary Clinton will be receiving an award from the Brady Campaign on 19 November. The award is not precisely for anything she ever did, as it happens. She’s getting it more for where she was at a fortuitous time. CBS explains:
The [Brady Campaign] pointed specifically to the candidate’s dedication to the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, passed while Clinton was first lady, which required a waiting period and national background check for handgun buyers.
“Mrs. Clinton was there when the historic Brady Law was signed by President Bill Clinton and she has demonstrated a clear commitment in support of our efforts to ‘finish the job’ and expand those lifesaving Brady background checks to all gun sales,” Gross added.
Having been in the photos when her husband signed a law passed by the Congress down the street is one of those quintessentially Hillary-esque accomplishments, like arriving at a foreign airport where maybe you could have come under sniper fire, even if you didn’t. But let’s keep moving, here.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
It’s always worth recalling Hillary’s actual record on guns. I wrote about it in May 2014, when a Sudden Meme burst across the infosphere proclaiming that Hillary had finally started talking about gun policy, after supposedly maintaining a long silence on it.
Besides proposing a national gun registry in 2000, and proposing liability laws for gun manufacturers this year – both noted by CBS – Hillary has a colorful history with gun policy. Selected highlights include:
1. Lying, while serving as the U.S. Secretary of State, about the provenance of guns used in crimes in Mexico.
As a reminder, one of Silent Hillary’s first actions as secretary of state was to go to Mexico and proclaim – falsely – that 90% of the guns used in drug crimes south of the border come from the United States. This bogus “statistic” was promptly debunked, but Clinton and Obama continued to use it.
Clinton’s willingness to tout falsified statistics rendered her posture suspect (along with the administration’s) when Operation Fast & Furious was uncovered, and it became widely known that the Obama administration had “walked” guns by the hundreds into the hands of cartel criminals, without coordinating the operation with Mexico, and without following up to track the guns.
2. Resurrecting the Arms Trade Treaty in the UN, which can basically be used only to disarm the law-abiding citizens of Western nations.
Hillary and Obama were credited with resurrecting the dormant treaty at the UN in 2009, when they offered U.S. backing for a re-launch of talks on the treaty, as long as the basis for moving forward was consensus by all parties.
The treaty’s fortunes were coming to a head in the summer of 2012, only months before the 2012 election, which was not good timing politically. With the Senate urging Obama against any agreement, he and Hillary decided to stall the treaty until after the election.
(It later passed, and was signed on behalf of the U.S. by John Kerry. It remains unratified, however.)
3. Arming Islamists by running a small-arms bazaar out of Libya in 2011-12.
Reports have persistently indicated that the main activity of the U.S. missions in Benghazi was handling the movement of small arms, whether the purpose was to collect them and remove them from Libya – i.e., to keep them out of the hands of local insurgents and terrorists – or more ominously to funnel them to the civil war in Syria. Hillary would have had full knowledge of whatever was going on.
Subsequent disclosures have shown that Hillary’s State Department, including Hillary herself, did indeed know about guns being run from Libya – specifically, Benghazi – to Syria. See here, here, and here, for starters.
But enough of the bad news. There’s a bright spot in the Hillary-and-guns saga. Fittingly, the award she will receive on Thursday is the inaugural Governor Mario Cuomo Leadership Award, named for the late governor of New York who did so much to disparage both gun rights and gun owners (the latter of whom he famously characterized as “hunters who drink beer, don’t vote, and lie to their wives about where they’ve been all weekend”).
