Three anti-gun bills died in the Senate on Wednesday, reflecting Americans’ diminishing interest in passing more gun laws that don’t work in reducing gun violence but instead punish law-abiding gun owners.
The primary bill was designed to resurrect the failed Clinton-era Brady bill that banned possession of so-called “assault weapons” for 10 years. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York knew it was a “hail Mary” effort that was staged only to keep the entire anti-gun narrative alive. He called for it to be brought to the floor and be passed by unanimous consent, without an individual vote count. One opponent would kill the bill, and more than one seized that opportunity.
One of those opposed was Wyoming Republican Senator John Barrasso:
Americans have a constitutional right to own a firearm. Every day, people across Wyoming responsibly use their Second Amendment rights to keep and bear arms.
Democrats are demanding that the American people give up their liberty….
Almost every single page of the bill that’s in front of us today adds new restrictions and new burdens on people who follow the law. It tells you what you can buy, what you can’t buy. It bans more than 205 rifles, shotguns, and pistols by name. Republicans reject these unjustified and unconstitutional restrictions.…
The Second Amendment is freedom’s essential safeguard. Without it, there can be no liberty and there can be no security. So Mr. President, I object.
Two other bills — one requiring universal background checks and the other regulating gun storage — failed as well, despite Schumer’s plea. Said Schumer:
The American people are sick and tired of enduring one mass shooting after another. They’re sick and tired of vigils and moments of silence for family, friends, classmates, coworkers.
Schumer didn’t mention the failure of the Clinton-era gun ban to reduce gun violence. According to a Department of Justice study published in 1999, it “failed to reduce the average number of victims per gun murder incident or multiple gunshot wound victims.” An updated study by the DOJ in 2004, the year the ban expired, revealed that, after 10 years, the ban’s “effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.”
Schumer did get one thing right: Americans are, in fact, sick and tired. But they are sick and tired of venal politicians passing more gun laws that have little if any impact on gun violence while skirting the issue of mental illness behind many of the attacks on innocents. Three recent polls — by Monmouth University, ABC News/Washington Post, and Quinnipiac University — revealed that more of those polled now oppose a gun ban than support one.
The only mention of “mental health” or “mental illness” during the Senate debate was an attempt to discredit it as a factor in mass shootings. Hard-left Democratic Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy intoned:
We don’t have more mental illness in this country, we don’t spend less money on law enforcement, we don’t have angrier people, we have more guns, and we are much more permissive in this country about allowing felons, dangerous people, to get their hands on guns.
A firearm, it needn’t be stated, is an inanimate object. It can be used for good or for ill. It’s the individual pulling the trigger that makes that decision, and that’s where the focus should be in arresting gun violence. But Senate Democrats, going as far back as 1995, made it abundantly clear who the real target was. Disappointed that the Brady bill didn’t ban every firearm then owned by every citizen, Senate Democrat Dianne Feinstein said:
If I could have gotten 51 votes for the outright ban, picking up every one of them, “Mr. and Mrs. America, turn ’em all in”, I would have done it.
Feinstein has gone to her final reward, but her ani-gun heirs such as Schumer and Murphy remain determined to complete what she started: the obliteration of the Second Amendment guarantee protecting the right of the private ownership of firearms in the United States. Americans are waking up to the threat, and their representatives, in this case at least, are shutting it down.
