Gun Control Activist Defaces 9/11 Memorial, Demands National Gun Registry
“A gun regulation activist was arrested for defacing the 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero in Manhattan with graffiti in an effort to draw attention to his website on Monday, officials said,” Daily News reported Wednesday. “Jonathan Andrew Tijerina, 31, scrawled ‘juststopkillingkids.com’ across bronze panels inscribed with the names of 9/11 victims at the memorial’s north pool around 5 p.m., police said.”
“Tijerina’s demands for stricter firearm regulation include universal background checks for gun purchases and laws requiring every gun in America to be registered, according to his website, which invites visitors to ‘learn how civil resistance works,’” the report elaborates.
“Just Stop Killing Kids,” the website demands, a sentiment all but the evil and depraved can share. The divergence comes from how best to achieve that goal, with Tijerina and his comrades coming down on the side of a government monopoly of violence.
“Civil resistance is proven to change laws and society. We are demanding action — and we will not stop until it happens,” the website declares, in effect threatening more disruptions and lawbreaking until they get what they want.
Here’s what they say they want – for now, claiming they are “Two specific, achievable demands. Neither requires repealing the Second Amendment. Both have majority public support. Both already exist in every other high-income country”:
Universal Background Checks: Every gun sale — private, online, at gun shows — must require a background check. No loopholes. No exceptions. This is the single most effective policy to keep guns out of dangerous hands.
Universal Gun Registry: Every firearm in America must be registered to its owner. Accountability deters crime, aids law enforcement, and creates the infrastructure for a safer society. Every car is registered. Every gun should be too.
That actually confirms an observation on how the two are intertwined made by the National Institute of Justice, in its “Summary of Select Firearm Violence Prevention Strategies” (scroll to pg. 5):
“Effectiveness depends on the ability to reduce straw purchasing, requiring gun registration…”
They’re actually not achievable. Criminals, the predators out there “killing kids” (who don’t register stolen cars, either) won’t obey the law, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics documents that they don’t obtain their guns through conventional means:
“Among these, more than half (56%) had either stolen it (6%), found it at the scene of the crime (7%), or obtained it off the street or from the underground market (43%). Most of the remainder (25%) had obtained it from a family member or friend, or as a gift. Seven percent had purchased it under their own name from a licensed firearm dealer.”
Universal registration would also only impact the “law-abiding” and is clearly aimed at stopping home builds, whether through traditional means or via 3D printing technology, pejoratively called “ghost guns.” By including “every firearm,” that presumably would require older models owned before the 1968 Gun Control Act requirement to be registered or forfeit.
It would also be key to confiscation when the state figures it can get away with it, and anyone who calls that paranoid has not been paying attention to admissions the prohibitionists have let slip over the years, nor what irrevocably set the Colonists on the road to rebellion in 1775.
As for having “majority support,” what has not been established (and prominent Second Amendment organizations ought to commission a survey — perhaps from the Crime Prevention Resource Center?) is how much respondents actually know about existing “gun laws” and the arguments against them before they’re being asked their opinions about adding new prohibitions (in couched terms). And the final canard being exploited is the “high-income country” deception, which always seems to exclude nations that don’t support foregone conclusions. Not only does that rely heavily on the correlation/causation logical fallacy, the whole point of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights is we’re not supposed to be like other countries, and the direction of immigration is pretty clear evidence that that’s recognized.
We’ve seen the flaws in the prohibitionists’ “reasoning.” Now let’s look at how they hope to achieve their objectives.
“Civil resistance is not hope. It is strategy. Here is what the data shows,” the Just Stop Killing Kids ‘Evidence’ page maintains, comparing itself and its tactics to the Freedom Riders, civil rights activists who rode buses into Southern states to pressure the Democrat Kennedy administration into enforcing Supreme Court rulings that segregated public buses were unconstitutional.
A section on the “Radical Flank Effect” explains both the strategy and a lot of what is happening within the Democrat Party in the merging of its establishment “old guard” with more radical emerging elements exemplified by Democratic Socialists of America and the like:
The Social Change Lab’s synthesis of historical and contemporary data found consistent evidence for the ‘radical flank effect’: the presence of a more radical wing of a movement increases public support for moderate demands, makes moderate negotiators appear more reasonable to policymakers, and expands the Overton window of what is politically possible. Movements with both radical and moderate wings consistently outperform movements with only one.
The “Freedom Rider” analogy is interesting because the organizing group behind that was CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality. It’s interesting because its national chairman, elected in 1968, was the late Roy Innis. And he stood directly opposed to what the prohibitionists are demanding:
He was a Life Member of the National Rifle Association and served on its governing board. Innis also chaired the NRA’s Urban Affairs Committee and was a member of the NRA Ethics Committee, and continued to speak publicly in the US and around the world in favor of individual civilian ownership of firearms, gun issues, and individual rights. He told Newsday in 1993, “My sons were not killed by the KKK or David Duke. They were murdered by young, black thugs. I use the murder of my sons by black hoodlums to shift the problems from excuses like the KKK to the dope pushers on the streets.”
It’s also interesting that the group is conflating kinetic action with civil disobedience, a time-honored American tradition exemplified by Henry David Thoreaus’s landmark essay Civil Disobedience. Contemporary parallels, such as the “I Will Not Comply” movement or my late friend and colleague (and “founder” of the Three Percent movement) Mike Vanderboegh’s magazine “smuggling” efforts, relied on defiance and disobedience, not on kinetic actions that expropriated and vandalized the property of others, and certainly did not desecrate the memories of fallen victims.
It says something about the company these people keep.
As long as Just Stop Killing Kids assumes the false mantle of civil rights activism to mask its subversive intents, it’s instructive to note that true Second Amendment activism is the real deal. Beginning in 2001, I was part of an effort to petition the Department of Justice to do what it had done in other states, like with the freedom Riders example, and enforce the Second Amendment. It’s personally gratifying to see that a quarter century later, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, under U.S. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, is setting in motion attempts to do just that.
For now, the universal background check/registration infringements aren’t happening. Fail to vote next Tuesday and the playing field will change. Extend emocrat electoral victories to ’28 and expect a Supreme Court makeover to reverse Heller, McDonald and Bruen, that 2A is an individual right, that it applies to state and local governments through the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause, and that there must be analogues in new gun laws to the text, history, and traditions at the time the Bill of Rights was ratified.
Vote.
Finally, it’s instructive to note how the Daily News characterized the mutt as a “A gun regulation activist.” The propaganda outlet has has long been a prime example of the DSM (Duranty/Streicher Media), ready to attack the right to keep and bear arms at every opportunitywith hysterics and vitriol.
A more appropriate headline presents the story over at the New York Post:
Outrage as gun control nut spray paints 9/11 Memorial in sick political stunt
Call these people what they are. And note the silence of sister organizations at condemning the desecration. As this article is being submitted for publication, not one of the leading national prohibitionist groups, Everytown, Giffords, and Brady, has acknowledged the vandalism. If they do, look for their statements to end up being demands for more infringements (and quite possibly for more money).
About David Codrea:
David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating/defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” is a regularly featured contributor to Firearms News, and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.
