Remember gun control?
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Monday revived his call for legislation to expand background checks for gun purchases after an unhinged Las Vegas couple went on a shooting spree on Sunday that killed two police officers and one civilian before they took their own lives.
“My deepest sympathies are with the families of those who died. We in Congress, we do need to put in place legislation that helps prevent these deranged, these weird, these evil people who carry out such savage acts of violence,” the Nevada Democrat said on the Senate floor. “Background checks — so that people who are criminals, who are deranged can’t buy a gun. The American people are depending on us to pass legislation to prevent gun violence and safeguard communities, schools and families.”
Whether gun legislation will come up again in the Senate is a different matter.
It has been nearly 14 months since legislation to require background checks for firearm purchases at gun shows and Internet sales fell to a Republican-led filibuster, coming up 5 votes short of the 60 needed to move forward. Since then the bill, sponsored by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Pat Toomey (R-PA), hasn’t picked up any new supporters, as Reid has repeatedly acknowledged over the last year. Wary of the power of the pro-gun lobby, Democrats have also largely steered clear of the issue on the 2014 campaign trail.
“There is not a single senator that I know of that says ‘let’s get rid of all the — let’s make sure people don’t have guns.’ We’re not saying that,” Reid said.
Of course!
Well… the devil is in the details… and I really can’t see the NRA letting any meaningful ‘sanity check’ actually make it into law. It quite possibly might mean that some responsible body might actually have to start asking questions of potential gun buyers and they would want to have full veto power over those questions. Could you imagine what it would do to their sales if it was found that there was a positive correlation between the potential to do violence on another and tea-party membership? I can imagine that they would want a way to prevent any such politically incorrect correlations from even being studied. After all… they know their membership better than the government does.
I submit that they may have at one time given lip service to allowing some kind of ‘sanity check’ prior to allowing a firearms purchase but they have since come to their senses and know that such a hurdle could ruin them. After all, in order for the ‘paranoid pitch’ to work, the target audience has to be a little bit nutz already.
Only a cretin like Reid could come up with something this stupid and flat out ignorant. Background checks to stop criminals and the deranged from acquiring guns are already in place. What has Harry Reid done as Senate Majority Leader to have the insane and deranged added to the backgrounds checklist? Can someone please explain to him that if the mentally ill aren’t on a list, background checks do not work?
You’re wrong.
http://libcloud.s3.amazonaws.com/9/a2/3/1982/MAIG_-2-Background_checks_national_charts-_b.pdf
Harry, Harry, Harry.
Gun control doesn’t work; look at all the shootings in Chicago!
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns!
Guns don’t kill people, people kill people!
We already have gun laws, which proves that no gun law, or any law of any kind, has ever worked at all.
Criminals don’t obey laws, so more laws won’t help.
If everybody in Las Vegas had been packing, this could have been avoided.
You know who else wanted to expand background checks? Hitler!
So, not only do we not need to have more gun laws, we need to get rid of all the laws have, see? Only then will we truly be free.
Or something.