Obama's Anti-Gun Slinger: Arne Duncan

He's a product of Chicago's liberal environment, a former professional basketball player known for his one-on-ones with rising Illinois politician Barack Obama.

Commentary By Mike McCarville

Now, at 44, former Chicago Schools Superintendent Arne Duncan is President Obama's choice as Secretary of Education and to that post, he brings a long-standing hostility toward gun ownership by law-abiding citizens and a stated desire to remove firearms from every home in America.

Duncan is viewed by some as part of Obama's stealth campaign to eliminate gun ownership in America. Teamed with Obama's new bureaucrat-in-chief, anti-gunner and wacko animal rights activist Cass Sunstein, Duncan is poised to ramrod an anti-gun agenda in the nation's educational system.

The NRA's flagship magazine, America's 1st Freedom, recently profiled Duncan in an article by well-known 2nd Amendment expert Dave Kopel.

Kopel notes that last October, the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence (aka the Illinois Council Against Guns) gave Duncan its "Man Of The Year" award. He refused to accept it, saying his fight to ban guns isn't over: "We'll keep fighting the NRA, the gun makers, the gun dealers, the gangbangers aned everyone else who refuses to accept the undeniable fact that guns and kids don't mix."

His statement is an attack on the high school Scholastic Clays Target Program, "gun clubs with small-bore shooting teams for teenagers, and parents who take their children hunting," Kopel writes.

Duncan goes further: "We'll fight them in Springfield, in the courts, in the community and even in the home."

In the home. Duncan wants to bring his radical opposition to firearms ownership and the 2nd Amendment into our homes.

Writes Kopel: "You may ask yourself, 'What can the secretary of education do to prohibit the rights of law-abiding gun owners?' To begin with, he can incessantly and hysterically use his bully pulpit to promote repressive gun control as an absolute necessity 'for the children.' That's what he did as superintendent of Chicago public schools."

Duncan believes in his radical approach: "This is a public health epidemic. We are struggling to find the cure for AIDS, we are struggling to find the cure for cancer; we know the cure for this public health epidemic: getting rid of guns."

Among Duncan's running mates are the extremist Catholic priest Michael Pfleger, whose statement that a Chicago gun dealer should be "snuffed out" brought censorship from his bishop; Mayor Richard Daley, who presides over a city with stringent gun control and one of the worse crime rates in the nation; and notorious gun-grabber Jesse Jackson.

Concludes Kopel: "There is every reason to be concerned that Duncan will turn the Department of Education into a tool to promote a gun-ban agenda in America's public schools. And we can fully expect that the 'mainstream' media, which was so viciously hostile to the Bush administration, will fawn over Duncan's public demands to repress the Second Amendment 'for the children.'"

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