Hillary’s lastest speech on gun control — or, do Leftists even bother to listen to themselves anymore?

Hillary has been taunting the NRA and its members:

Hillary Clinton is ramping up her rhetoric on guns, comparing the National Rifle Association (NRA) to global adversaries she negotiated with as secretary of State.

“You know, the NRA’s position reminds me of negotiating with the Iranians or the communists,” [Mrs.] Clinton said at an Iowa town hall on Wednesday. . . .

“The NRA tries to keep gun owners—the ones who are members—really upset all the time so they can keep collecting their money, because they tell them they’re the only thing that’s going to stop the black helicopters from landing in the front yard and people’s guns being seized,” Clinton said. “That’s the argument they make. And it works with some people and it has turned a lot of people into absolutists themselves.”

James Taranto makes mincemeat out of the simultaneously risible and invidious comparison between the NRA and the free world’s arch enemies, as well as about Hillary’s much publicized flip-flops on the trade agreement, so I won’t address those points here.

I wanted to address an entirely different point. According to Hillary, the NRA is a disgraceful fear-mongering organization that manipulates its members by telling them things that Hillary implies are false. And what are these falsehoods the NRA tells? “[T]hey [the NRA] tell them [NRA members] they’re the only thing that’s going to stop the black helicopters from landing in the front yard and people’s guns being seized.”

We’ll accept the bit about the black helicopters as acceptable rhetorical hyperbole, akin to puffery in advertising. Everyone listening understands that the “black helicopters” to which she refers are a stand-in for “the government.” And what does the NRA falsely tell people that “the government” is going to do? Well, if you look past Hillary’s passive voice construction, the NRA is telling its members that the government is going to seize their guns. And that, says Hillary, is a lie being used on feeble-minded mouth breathers who are all married to their siblings and have never seen The New York Times.

Funnily enough, though, that’s exactly what President Obama is proposing (and that every registered Democrat on my Facebook feed enthusiastically supports). He’s praised Australia’s approach to gun violence:

“Couple of decades ago, Australia had a mass shooting, similar to Columbine or Newtown. And Australia just said, well, that’s it, we’re not doing, we’re not seeing that again, and basically imposed very severe, tough gun laws, and they haven’t had a mass shooting since,” said the president in a pre-arranged session held to discuss his plans to help cut student debt.

More than that, he’s said he’d like to see Australia’s and England’s gun laws enacted here:

We know that other countries, in response to one mass shooting, have been able to craft laws that almost eliminate mass shootings. Friends of ours, allies of ours — Great Britain, Australia, countries like ours. So we know there are ways to prevent it.

So what did they do in Australia and England that Obama wants to emulate? They grabbed guns. That is, they didn’t just place more stringent regulations on selling guns (almost none of which would have stopped any of the mass shooters who have been appearing with some regularity under Obama’s administration). Instead, they took guns away. In Australia, it was framed as a “buyback,” but owners were forced to sell, so it was really compensation for a government-enforced seizure, and then left it to the government to decide whether any given individual is worthy of a gun:

But the Australian 1996 National Agreement on Firearms was not a benign set of commonsense gun-control rules: It was a gun-confiscation program rushed through the Australian parliament just twelve days after a 28-year-old man killed 35 people with a semi-automatic rifle in the Tasmanian city of Port Arthur. The Council of Foreign relations summarizes the Aussie measure nicely:

The National Agreement on Firearms all but prohibited automatic and semiautomatic assault rifles, stiffened licensing and ownership rules, and instituted a temporary gun buyback program that took some 650,000 assault weapons (about one-sixth of the national stock) out of public circulation. Among other things, the law also required licensees to demonstrate a “genuine need” for a particular type of gun and take a firearm safety course.

England has also made guns verboten. Private gun ownership in England has all but vanished (and the British Left would love to see it vanish entirely).

In other words, Hillary’s childish insults to the contrary, the crazy paranoid NRA and its crazy paranoid members are right: What the Democrat party wants to do is enact Australian and English style laws that have at their heart gun seizures and the denial of future gun ownership.

You can go here and here to find out just how successful those gun grabs have been at reducing gun crime and overall crime in England and Australia.  Hint:  Americans have seen a significantly greater drop in crime as their gun possession has increased, compared to the two other countries, with Australia maintaining the same trajectory as before the gun seizure and with England becoming one of the most violent countries in the West.  Let’s just say it’s not surprising that Muslims are moving on Europe with increasing confidence now that Europe has voluntarily and unilaterally disarmed itself.