Sanders Feels The Bern After Surrounding Himself With Armed Police At National Walkout Rally

By Aaron Kesel

Senator Bernie Sanders joined students participating in a national walkout to protest gun violence outside the Capitol in Washington, D.C surrounded by armed police as he delivered a hypocritical speech calling for the “courage to take out the NRA” and common sense gun control in response to the Parkland high school attack, Newsweek reported.

Sanders live streamed his speech on his Facebook page, which towards the middle featured him moving through the crowd of cheering students and shaking their hands. As Sanders traveled through the protesters chanting for gun control, he was accompanied by three heavily armed Capitol police officers there to escort him through the students.

Multiple times in the live feed, the police can be heard asking the students to “step back and move away from Sanders,” as is the protocol with congressman and especially presidents to protect them from deranged psychopaths.

This isn’t the first time that Democrats have been ridiculed for the calls to ban firearms yet still have depended on them for safety.

In 2016, gun-rights groups called for Democrats to bar any armed security at the Democratic National Convention.

“Gun owners are demanding that the Democratic party practice what it preaches,” read a petition from the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. “If a political party believes that guns do not make us safer, they should set an example by rejecting any and all forms of armed security at their convention.”

Sanders frequently makes two points about his gun record, as The Washington Post reported during the 2016 election where his opponent Hillary Clinton often used his stances on gun control against him.

He has a D-minus rating from the NRA, and the NRA’s endorsement of his opponents during his first congressional race in 1988 may have cost him the election. Sanders’s most recent grade from the NRA was a D-minus. Since 1992, the first year the NRA issued a grade for Sanders, he has received between a C-minus and F. Since 1988, Sanders has been consistent on restricting the use of semiautomatic firearms (often called “assault weapons”).

Further, as per that report, Sanders voted on a 2005 law giving broad federal immunity to gun manufacturers; now he wants to suddenly ban semi-automatic firearms.

However, for three decades, Sanders has “believed we should not be selling assault weapons” like the accused gunman’s AR-15.

“These weapons are not for hunting,” he said. “They’re for killing human beings,” Sanders stated on NBC’s The View last month.

In that same interview Sanders previously also stated that Congress should close the “gun show loophole” ― the lack of federal rules mandating background checks on the sale of guns between privates sellers.

In his time in Congress, Sanders has voted against a bill in the 1990s to require a five-day waiting period to allow for criminal background checks before a gun could be purchased, voted to allow firearms on Amtrak, and expressed opposition against a lawsuit to hold gun manufacturers accountable for the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. However, on the other side of the coin, he has also voted for universal background checks and an assault weapons ban more recently.

In a 2015 speech while campaigning, Sanders expressed a similar argument for common sense gun control which he explained:

vast majority of hunters don’t use semi-assault weapons when they hunt, and they don’t have magazines that shoot 30 rounds at a time. So I hope as a nation we would ban these type of assault weapons so they don’t get into the hands of gun dealers.

Sanders further added that there is a cultural divide between urban and rural America on gun regulation, arguing what seemed to be to create two different regulations for rural and urban America so that everyone is happy.

“People in urban America can not demonize or stereotype people in rural America because they own guns and they hunt. While people in rural America who hunt have got to understand that guns in Chicago and LA mean a very different thing then guns in Vermont and New Hampshire. And if we can come to that understanding and cross this cultural divide we can finally come up with common sense gun solutions that the vast part of American people will support,” Sanders said, on the campaign trail.

Both U.S. President Donald Trump and Democrats have actively argued for disarming the public of assault rifles and even allowing police the power to decide who can and can’t keep their firearms if they are classified “dangerous” by government standards.

Although, U.S. President Donald Trump has since backtracked on his remarks stating that he wanted to confiscate guns “from certain individuals deemed to be dangerous.”

Meanwhile, in the state of Florida, where the Parkland shooting took place, confiscating firearms has already taken place under Florida’s new gun-control laws, temporarily removing guns from a 56-year-old man’s possession.

Four firearms and 267 rounds of ammunition were ordered removed from the man who was determined to be a potential risk to himself or others; or as Trump would state, a man “deemed to be dangerous.”

The guns and ammunition have been temporarily removed from the man under the state’s new “risk protection” law, which is also sometimes called “red flag” legislation, Lighthouse Point City Attorney Michael Cirullo confirmed to the Orlando Sentinel.

In the beginning of March, House Democrats in agreement with Trump have introduced a bill H.R.5087 that if passed would ban the sale of semi-automatic firearms. The legislation opts to prohibit the “sale, transfer, production, and importation” of semi-automatic rifles and pistols that can hold a detachable magazine, as well as semi-automatic rifles with a magazine that holds more than 10 rounds.

Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., announced the legislation entitled: “Assault Weapons Ban of 2018.”

In the gun debate, there is only one video that ever needs to be seen and that’s the Congressional hearing testimony of Suzanna Gratia Hupp, a survivor of the Luby’s shooting, also known as the Luby’s massacre. The attack left 23 people dead and injured another 27 when a deeply disturbed man, George Hennard, drove his pickup truck through the front window of a Texas restaurant.

On October 16, 1991, George Hennard drove his 1987 Ford Ranger pickup truck through the front window of a Luby’s Cafeteria at 1705 East Central Texas Expressway in Killeen, screaming “This is what Bell County has done to me!” then opened fire on the restaurant’s patrons and staff with a Glock 17 pistol and later a Ruger P89.

During the shooting, Hennard approached Suzanna Gratia Hupp and her parents. Hupp had actually brought a handgun to the Luby’s Cafeteria that day but had left it in her vehicle due to the laws enforced at the time, forbidding citizens from carrying firearms.

According to her testimony in favor of Missouri’s HB-1720 bill (a law to allow concealed carry), after she realized that her firearm was not in her purse but “a hundred feet away in her car,” her father charged at Hennard in an attempt to subdue him, only to be gunned down; a short time later, her mother was also shot and killed.

Hupp expressed regret for abiding by the law in question by leaving her firearm in her car, rather than keeping it on her person. She further stated that she didn’t blame the killer or the gun; she blamed her legislators because she couldn’t protect herself and her family.

It is worth noting in Hupp’s statement she expressed that she was not a representative of the NRA when she gave her testimony.

The Second Amendment is a right of the people; if you ban sales from lawful citizens, you will encourage black market sales of firearms where the weapons aren’t registered. In such a case, all the criminals will be armed while forcing innocent civilians to be easy targets for a lunatic/lunatics or worse  — tyranny will rise, as history has proven from dictatorship to dictatorship time and time again.

Again, we will ask the question why would anyone be excited about disarming themselves under any president who shows contempt for the U.S. Constitution and due process, while simultaneously increasing the availability of military weaponry to the nation’s police? Shouldn’t we have learned the lessons of history by now?

Aaron Kesel writes for Activist Post. Support us at Patreon. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Steemit, and BitChute. Ready for solutions? Subscribe to our premium newsletter Counter Markets.

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