On Rachel Maddow’s show last night, she opened with an interesting and lengthy segment on the difficulty of moving gun safety regulations through Congress over the years, even in the aftermath of JFK’s assassination.
This chart, however, and the quick thoughts on it that followed, caught my eye. It’s based on details from a new Washington Post poll released Tuesday, asking “Would you support or oppose a law requiring background checks on people buying guns at gun shows?”…
When the Senate Judiciary Committee today moved a universal background checks bill — they moved it through committee to send to a floor vote in the Senate later this week — do you want to know how many Republicans voted for universal background checks on the committee? Zero. The vote was 10 to 8. All the Democrats vote in favor. All the Republicans voted against.
All the Republicans voted against something with 91% support among the public. Tell me how this ends for the Republican Party.
Brad sedd:
Ok, I will byte.
They will have to use gerrymandering and voter suppression?
I think they actually voted against storing the background check data which was part of the bill
The issue is not background checks, which apply to the majority of gun purchases already. The issue is whether the results of the background checks will be saved for those law-abiding citizens who pass the background check.
What useful purpose could that database server? What harm could it do in malevolent hands?
Disagreement on that issue is what prevented Schumer and Coburn from reaching a compromise.
Hmmm, and they wonder why Congressional approval is around 13%.
Saving or discarding the info seems like a mere formality to me; I’m sure the NSA has all of it anyway, without getting any stinkin’ warrants. How’s about the Republicans address that little unconstitutional travesty sometime in the near future? If they do that, I might start to think they actually mean what they’re saying, rather than assuming they’re just bought and paid for.
Scrivener @3 writes:
Ah, how the gun advocates play with statistics.
Since 40% of guns are sold without background checks, it is true that background checks were utilized for the majority of gun purchases.
But, given that there were 16,808,538 applications for the purchase of weapons requiring background checks in 2012, that would mean that more than 12 million guns were sold via the gaping gun show/Internet sales loopholes.
12 million guns falling into the hands of criminals and the sanity challenged would seem to be a significant problem for anyone other than those who fall for the NRA “majority of purchases” line.