The package of gun legislation the House is preparing to move out of committee this week is already a compromise, as Daily Kos’s Meteor Blades writes. The package of eight bills should pass in the House easily, albeit with just Democratic votes, because it leaves out some of the much stronger provisions—like an assault weapons ban.
One of the key things House Democrats are counting on to pressure the Senate, specifically Senate Republicans, is raising the age limit for the purchase of semi-automatic weapons. There’s certainly precedent—the age limit for handgun purchases from licensed sellers is 21. Semi-automatics have just slipped into the space from previous laws that included rifles for hunting. Under this part of the bill, federal licensees would be barred from selling the weapons to anyone under 21, with exemptions for members of the military and/or law enforcement. That should be simple enough, right? One of the horrific details of the Robb Elementary School massacre in Uvalde, Texas, was that the shooter celebrated his 18th birthday by buying two AR-15s, one of which killed 19 fourth-graders and two teachers and wounded 17 more people.
Again, it should be a no-brainer. It should be something even Republicans could agree to. But as Arthur Delaney and Igor Bobic write at HuffPost, even that incremental effort is facing Republican opposition.
“I got my first rifle for Christmas when I was 14,” Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) told the reporters. “You know, I think this is just not the time to be trying to change major policies. I think this is the time to mourn with the people that have lost loved ones to reflect and to try to figure out what’s really causing these. And I don’t think we’ve done that yet.” Uh-huh.
Elie Mystal is on Daily Kos' The Brief podcast today
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Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) who is retiring and thus in a position to justify his long existence in the Senate told them that he might be open to effective legislation, but doesn’t think this would be it. “I’m not sure that the answer would be yes, just by changing the age,” Burr said. “If that were the case, we wouldn’t have illegal purchases of tobacco or beer.”
Why have laws at all? People just break them. Echoing that: “Those who want to break the law will find a way to get around the law. That’s just the facts,” Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) said.
Yes, as Delaney and Bobic point out, Republicans did agree just three years ago to raise the age for purchasing tobacco to 21. As they also point out, then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell championed that legislation. But it wasn’t out of the goodness of his heart or his desire to save the nation’s young people.
What he was doing there, championing this age restriction change, was Big Tobacco’s bidding. There had been a push in the states to try to stop young people from vaping, to ban flavored vaping products, ban menthol cigarettes, and raise sales taxes on tobacco products. Raising the legal age for tobacco purchases, Big Tobacco and McConnell calculated, would shut down many of those efforts.
McConnell doesn’t give a damn about the public health—or the lives—of young Americans, whether it’s tobacco or guns that are harming them.
Since McConnell’s first term in the Senate, he’s pushed the same line: “We need to be careful about legislating in the middle of a crisis.” That was his response to the deadliest mass shooting his home state has ever experienced, back in 1989. Eight people were killed and dozen wounded in a workplace shooting in Louisville. That was a crisis he didn’t want to be hasty in responding to.
Thirty-three years later and he’s still advising that congress can’t respond to a crisis by governing. Already this week he’s trying to change the subject from guns. It’s about “mental health and school safety,” he told reporters Tuesday.
What might be different this time is that his single-minded obstruction is being called out by some traditional media, including this scathing write-up in the Washington Post.
“If there’s any one individual in the United States to blame for our inability to put things in place to prevent gun violence, it’s Mitch McConnell,” Peter Ambler, the executive director of Giffords, told the Post. “McConnell understands he’s hostage to that extreme base that just doesn’t tolerate any departure from any of their views.”
John Feinblatt, the president of Everytown for Gun Safety, told the Post, “I don’t want to mince words. The Republican senators are what is costing American lives. And McConnell is the head of the Republican Senate.” He continued, “I am encouraged that McConnell gave the green light to Cornyn. That is what I would call step one.”
Step one is all that Connecticut Sens. Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal can hope for at this juncture. The two have been fighting for any kind of meaningful response since the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre in Newtown, Connecticut nearly a decade ago. They are leading bipartisan talks now, but remain cautious
“I’m sober-minded about our chances,” Murphy told Politico. “I have had the football pulled out from under me enough times to be realistic.” Blumenthall added, “We have a handful of Republicans, but we need 10.” He wants to “show my Republican colleagues that voting for some commonsense measures isn’t suicidal politically.” He is also resigned to passing something that “will be less than what we want, for sure. But if it’s a step that leads to more steps, it will be a good start.”
Not if McConnell has his way.
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