Obama helped fund handgun-ban efforts
Lately, the political world has buzzed about Barack Obama’s tenure with the Woods Foundation, where he worked with domestic terrorist William Ayers and which issued a $75,000 grant to Yasser Arafat toady Rashid Khalidi. However, Politico has found another paid foundation gig which may raise even more questions about Obama’s positions and honesty. While working as a director at the Joyce Foundation, the organization funneled almost $3 million in grants to political groups opposing gun rights:
Barack Obama’s presidential campaign has worked to assure uneasy gun owners that he believes the Constitution protects their rights and that he doesn’t want to take away their guns.
But before he became a national political figure, he sat on the board of a Chicago-based foundation that doled out at least nine grants totaling nearly $2.7 million to groups that advocated the opposite positions.
The foundation funded legal scholarship advancing the theory that the Second Amendment does not protect individual gun owners’ rights, as well as two groups that advocated handgun bans. And it paid to support a book called “Every Handgun Is Aimed at You: The Case for Banning Handguns.”
Obama’s eight years on the board of the Joyce Foundation, which paid him more than $70,000 in directors fees, do not in any way conflict with his campaign-trail support for the rights of gun owners, Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for Obama’s presidential campaign, asserted in a statement issued to Politico this week.
Seven of the grants were awarded when Obama served on the board. Where did the money go?
- $2.5 million went to the Violence Policy Center, which has campaigned for a national ban on all handguns.
- $20,000 paid to publish Every Handgun Is Aimed at You: The Case for Banning Handguns
- $10,000 went to another gun-banning group, Handgun-Free America
Does anyone else see a pattern? If Obama doesn’t want to ban handguns, he certainly chose the wrong foundation to help run. Once again, his track record speaks in opposition to his blandishments towards the benighted and embittered gun owners that he wants to rescue through bigger federal government.
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