Three days after the Las Vegas massacre, California senator Dianne Feinstein introduced a bill to ban the “bump stock,” which mass murderer Stephen Paddock had mounted on 12 rifles. No device or weapon fires on its own, but Senator Feinstein believes that banning mechanical devices is job one for legislators.
“Mr. and Mrs. America,” Feinstein told reporters, “you have to stand up, you have to say enough is enough.” It was not a new theme for the California Democrat.
In 2012, Feinstein essentially ignored Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza and sought to ban rapid-fire devices and “assault weapons,” which escape easy definition. The California senator, now 84, shows a certain selectivity on the use of such weapons.
In 2015, Islamic terrorists Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik shot dead 14 in San Bernardino, California. Feinstein’s statement failed to name the terrorists or chart their motives, but the senator did blame “assault weapons” and attack the “gun lobby.”
After Omar Mateen gunned down 49 last year in Orlando. Feinstein again decried “military-style assault weapons,” but did not even mention the name of the Muslim shooter and his motivation to kill.
In 2015 in Feinstein’s home town, repeatedly deported felon Juan Francisco Lopez Sanchez gunned down Kate Steinle. The murder did not prompt Feinstein to oppose sanctuary cities that shelter violent criminals. Indeed, she opposed legislation to cut funding to communities that do not comply with notification and detention requests from federal authorities.
In 2016, Micah Johnson murdered five Dallas police officers and wounded nine others. In her statement, Feinstein bundled that mass murder with the police shooting of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Philando Castile in St. Paul, Minnesota. Feinstein named those victims but did not name the five slain Dallas police officers.
She also failed to name the man who killed them or mention his connection to Black Lives Matter. Johnson’s murder spree did not prompt Feinstein to propose legislation against cop-killers. The San Francisco Democrat reserves her wrath for a different kind of person.
Randy Weaver chose to live in rural Idaho and the old-line establishment media branded him a “white separatist.” In 1992, an ATF agent tried to scam him into selling sawed-off shotguns. A standoff and firefight ensued, claiming Weaver’s son Samuel and a U.S. Marshal.
The next day, FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi shot Randy Weaver’s wife Vicki through the head as she held her 10-month-old daughter. As Weaver testified to the Senate in 1995, “he shot my wife in the head and killed her. She was not wanted for any crime. There were no warrants for her arrest. As the bullet crashed through her head, she slumped to her knees… We took the baby from her as she lay dead and bleeding on our kitchen floor.”
San Francisco media are generally kind to Feinstein but they noted that she was harder on the Weavers than fellow Democrats Herb Kohl and Patrick Leahy. As the San Francisco Examiner reported, “Feinstein dealt sternly with Weaver, asking whether his children wore Nazi arm bands and shouted Nazi slogans at neighbors.”
The Justice Department eventually agreed to pay $3.1 million to Weaver’s family. Feinstein apparently had no regrets.
In 1993, Clinton Attorney General Janet Reno approved the use of military tanks in an attack on the compound at Waco, Texas, claiming the lives of 75 people, including 25 children. Reno sent a federal SWAT team to grab Elian Gonzalez and the Clinton administration duly returned the refugee to the Cuban Communist dictatorship of Fidel Castro.
In her statement following Reno’s death in 2016, Feinstein said the Clinton Attorney General “combined an expertise in criminal justice with a deep sense of independent thought, and not once did she prove me wrong.” Reno played a “pivotal role in a number of high-profile events from the Waco siege to the Elian Gonzalez saga” and other cases. The California Democrat approved all of it, but she was not a stranger to violence.
During the 1970s, the leftist New World Liberation Front was connected to at least 70 bombings in northern California. As San Francisco Chronicle editor Jerry Roberts recalled in Dianne Feinstein: Never Let Them See You Cry, the NWLF put out a death warrant on Feinstein, then a San Francisco supervisor.
“Dianne, as you fear what will happen to you and your family, so do poor people fear for our families,” said one NWLF communiqué. “If we deal out justice as it’s dealt us, we would have shot you long ago for your horrible crimes against the people.”
The NWLF planted a bomb at Feinstein’s San Francisco home then shot out a window at Feinstein’s vacation property on Monterey Bay. She responded by getting a pistol permit, learning to shoot at the police academy, and packing a .38 revolver in her purse.
As mayor, Feinstein backed a measure to ban ownership of handguns in San Francisco. That would have denied others the protection she wanted when the New World Liberation Front was out to kill her and her family.
Feinstein is up for reelection in 2018 and promoters are hailing her as a model of integrity and moderation. As her tirade against “Mr. and Mrs. America” confirms, that’s not who she is.
Like other Democrats, Dianne Feinstein defends the utopian America of her dreams. Senator Feinstein doesn’t much like the America that actually exists, with its Second Amendment. As Jeane Kirkpatrick said, the San Francisco Democrats always blame America first.
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