For the second time in two days, the House has passed gun safety legislation, the first real expansion of gun safety laws since 1994 and the only gun safety legislation to come to the floor in eight years. H.R. 1112, which passed 228-198, extends the background check period from three days to 20, closing the so-called Charleston loophole.
The widow and daughters of Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was killed along with eight other black parishioners at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, by Dylann Roof, were on hand to watch the vote. Rev. Pinckney’s assassin had felony drug charges, but was still able to purchase the weapon used in that massacre because those charges didn't show up in the three-day check. "I wish that Clementa could be here," his widow Jennifer said shortly before the vote. "But I know that he’s smiling down and hoping that everyone will do the right thing."
The vote followed another attempt by Republicans to poison the bill, this time by adding an amendment in a motion to recommit that would allow victims of domestic violence to get a weapon within three days. It was powerfully and emotionally countered by Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell, who spoke forcefully about her father's mental illness and violence, and how she hid in a closet as a child and ultimately had to keep her father from killing her mother. "He shouldn't have had a gun!" she said. When her mother got her own gun, Dingell said, the children in the family were even more frightened, because "we had two guns to worry about." She concluded by telling her colleagues "I oppose this motion with every bit of my heart and soul," urging them to "do the same."
Whether it was her impassioned speech (see the whole thing below the fold) or Speaker Nancy Pelosi's whip-cracking in Thursday morning's conference meeting, there were only two Democratic defections on that motion to recommit, as opposed to the 26 we saw yesterday.
