As part of their ongoing efforts to make America less safe, the Republican Party is doing away with one of the few reforms to America's lunatic gun policies that followed the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. Because it's important, says the Republican Party, that Americans with mental disorders be able to purchase enough guns and ammunition to murder a few classrooms full of our children if they feel like doing that.
The Republican-led Senate voted Wednesday to block an Obama-era regulation that would prevent an estimated 75,000 people with mental disorders from being able to purchase a firearm. The measure now goes to President Donald Trump, who is expected to sign it.
The rule was an imperfect one—but one of the few that could be enacted in the face of overwhelming Republican opposition to doing anything more substantive. It was to collect a list of the 75,000ish people in America who both have a mental disorder and whose Social Security benefits are managed by someone other than themselves because of that impairment, and forwards that list on to the federal background check system. The goal was to screen out those whose condition is so severe that it renders them unable to make their own financial decisions, under the presumption that those people probably should be among those also least capable of making decisions about when or when not to murder people. And yes, it would have picked up false positives (there was an appeal process for those), but in general that was considered an acceptable trade for making sure those with severe mental disorders were not handed murder weapons for funsies.
The NRA, however, was furious. The NRA is the nation's largest collection of mentally impaired people with obsessive gun fetishes, and this rule could not be left standing. So murder weapons for funsies it is.
Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) spearheaded the repeal effort and said the regulation unfairly stigmatizes the disabled and infringes on their constitutional right to bear arms. He said that the mental disorders covered through the regulation are filled with "vague characteristics that do not fit into the federal mentally defective standard" prohibiting someone from buying or owning a gun.
Which is why those people could appeal; the screen was admittedly an imprecise one, precisely because Republicans blocked all attempts to craft anything better. Republicans have, systemically, blocked all substantive measures aimed at reducing gun violence.
Trump is expected to sign the legislation, because Trump will sign anything his advisers toss on his desk. Note, though, that the Donald Trump team upon gaining office immediately crafted an order closing our nation to anyone with connection to a set of Muslim-majority nations, whether they had legal entry to the United States or not, whether they had permanent visa status or not, and whether they had ever so much as themselves been in those other nations or not, based on the premise that it was better to shut out war refugees, medical students, doctors, Army interpreters, immigrants, etc., etc., to a person than take the risk that even one of those individuals might do something violent.
When it comes to guns, though? There's no such standard. Keeping murder weapons out of the hands of anybody is an outrage that could never be tolerated, and if that means accepting the current levels of mass violence in America as Good and Patriotic and A Price We Must Pay, then that is what it means. Immigrants have less rights than handguns in America today. That's by design.