Former President Bush adviser Karl Rove had a heated exchange about gun control with ABC's Terry Moran on This Week Sunday.
At one point Moran told Rove, "You're scaring people with this Orwellian sense that black helicopters and the government if we register guns are going to confiscate Americans’ guns" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
KARL ROVE: Let's be clear about this. This is prompted by the Sandy Hook murders. Those guns were legally purchased with a background check. This would not have solved something like that. Let's be very careful about quickly trampling on the rights of people. And look, you want to get something done? Then stop scaring people. Don’t say we’re going to keep a registry of all these guns. And let’s not make it so impractical...
TERRY MORAN, ABC: Stop scaring people? You're scaring people with this Orwellian sense that black helicopters and the government if we register guns are going to confiscate Americans’ guns. That kind of paranoia fuels...
ROVE: With all due respect, it is not paranoia.
MORAN: Who’s going to confiscate all the guns in America?
ROVE: People have a fear of this. Why do it? Why do you need it?
MORAN: Lots of things are registered in the United States of America because they're dangerous.
ROVE: Do we register books? Do we register other things that are Constitutional?
MORAN: No we don’t. The result of this is the only votes really that have been taken since Newtown have weakened gun control in America.
What gun registry advocates such as Moran seem to miss when they talk about other things being registered is that driving for example isn't a right. It's a privilege that can be revoked.
As such, equating the registration of cars to guns is a false equivalence.
More importantly, it is indeed the anti-gun side of this debate led by the media stoking the public's fear.
Any suggestion to the contrary is absurd despite it being par for the course.
