Posted on 04/26/2013 1:02:05 PM PDT by pabianice
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., was glum after background checks went down April 17. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
A week after gun legislation suffered a stinging defeat in the Senate, an uncomfortable realization has settled over the Capitol that it will likely take another mass shooting or similar tragedy to reignite momentum for gun control.
President Obama called last weeks vote round one. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., pledged that it was just the beginning. But gun-control advocates, both inside and outside of Congress, have identified no immediate path forward to alter a political landscape that left them five votes short in the Senate of passing a bill requiring expanded background checks for gun purchases.
Focus in the Capitol has already shifted to immigration, renewed fiscal skirmishes, and the Boston bombings (though some questions remain over how the suspects obtained firearms). Even Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., the chief Republican coauthor of the background-check plan, has said it is time to move on.
Proponents of new gun restrictions still hope to use the 2014 elections to upend the current dynamics, in which voting against the gun lobby is deeply feared, especially in GOP-leaning states. They plan to rely upon the impassioned pleas of the families of the Newtown shooting victims, New York Mayor Michael Bloombergs money, and former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords national stature. Before the next election, though, the truth is that another tragedy may be the only way to shake loose the legislation.
Unfortunately, tragically, regrettably, therell be other incidents of gun violence that will remind us of how much is at stake, said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat who has pushed hard for new gun laws after the December shooting that left 20 elementary school students dead.
The calls for stricter gun laws were loudest in the immediate aftermath of Newtown. But as the weeks and months passed, the powerful National Rifle Association, which opposed virtually any new firearm limits, including background checks, regained its footing.
On Wednesday, MSNBCs Joe Scarborough told Toomey that he was still shocked that the Senate couldnt pass expanded background checks with 60 votes when it was an issue supported by 95 percent of the public, as Scarborough put it.
I would suggest that we heard from the 5 percent who opposedseveral times from each one of them, Toomey replied. It was a much more vocal and much more passionate expression from that camp.
To advance the bill in the future, added Toomey, I think the most important thing, frankly, is members of Congress need to hear from peopleand the people who support these background checks need to be as vocal as those who dont.
It is a shortcoming that gun-control advocates acknowledge. We talk about that as the passion gap, and we have to close that, said Ladd Everitt, spokesman for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. He said his group had spent the last week thanking and spanking senators for their votes.
If we really want to succeed, what we really need to do is demonstrate that our movement can reward allies and punish people who vote against us, Everitt said.
Accusations that the White House did not move fast enough have been a recurrent critique of the administrations handling of the gun issue after the Newtown massacre.
Expanding background checks reaps as much as 90 percent support in polling. But a new Pew Research Center/Washington Post poll shows far more division on the recent gun bill: 47 percent of Americans were disappointed or angry at the legislations defeat, but 39 percent were very happy or relieved.
Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., the other chief architect of the bipartisan compromise on background checks, suggested last Friday that the legislation would have proven much more acceptable if it had been on the floor in January. Thats when emotions still ran high after Newtown and the gun lobby was more divided.
At that time we could have done something. So you seize the moment, Manchin said, though he and Toomey didnt reach a deal on background checks until April. Manchin has said he will continue to pressure his colleagues, one by one, though such an approach seems unlikely to break the deadlock.
Now, at least, Democrats and their allies have a package of gun-control measuresled by the Manchin-Toomey proposalready to be enacted practically immediately. Reid can bring the failed background-checks effort back to the floor at almost any time.
The next Newtown is inevitable if we dont act.... This is just our reality, Everitt said. Those things can help inform debate and galvanize people to act.
About 5 percent donated money for gun control and despise limits on government power.
No question that this Regime will do just that.
I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that they did have a hand in Aurora and possibly Newtown.
Agree with you on Sandy Hook, it stinks like the typical false flag. The Boston Bomb hoax is almost a complete repeat....the sheep will never wake up but I expect another false flag to get the guns soon. The elite are becoming desperate and thus no one is safe!
Per Mapquest, Watertown, MA, via I-90 W, 2 hrs 34 mins / 145.06 miles from Newtown, CT.
President Obama called last weeks vote round one. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., pledged that it was just the beginning.
So apparently the demoRAT bastards are putting out the call for some deranged liberal lunatic to step forward & commit the murder & mayhem that demoRATs are so desparate to capitalize on?
What despicable evil reprobates the demoRATs are!!!
What is to stop them from pulling a Brady Act 2?
It was Thanksgiving weekend, most of congress had gone home. 4 senators called a quorum and voted in the bill. Mark Hatfield and Bob Dole were the two ‘R’s. And what do the republicans do about that outrage???? They NOMINATE DOLE FOR PRESIDENT!!
That’s when I quit the GOP.
[snip]As Vice President Al Gore and Mark O. Hatfield, an Oregon Republican who supported the bill, watched, the two Senate leaders, Bob Dole of Kansas and George J. Mitchell of Maine, pronounced the measure adopted by unanimous consent. That is a parliamentary device allowing the leaders to pass the legislation themselves by voice vote after ascertaining that no senator would object.
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/25/us/gun-control-act-wins-final-battle-as-gop-retreats.html
These people are truly sick. They act like that gun bill was one freakin sentence.
He’s still on about Newton after BOSTON
But, can they absolutely guarantee their law banning AR-15 will prevent another massacre? if they can’t, they are just blowing smoke.
If that is what it will take, that is what will happen.
The rats have neither the martial skill nor the manpower to implement their gun seizure program. The fever swamps of the south and the people who live there are not Boston sheep who bleat.
You federal fascists freaks learned that once during Katrina. A second lesson can be applied.
So they're saying they're going to keep murdering children, teachers, and preppers until they get gun control.
Since Dec 14 we have Kim Jong Un saying he's going to nuke us, we have terrorists bombing marathoners, we have a nuclear-scale explosion at a fertilizer plant. Does anyone besides me think that our country has lost its divine protection since we let Obama and his Mao-worshipping commie friends get away with murdering 20 six-year olds?
I have come to the conclusion that the Republican party is complicit. The level of "incompetence" is, as you observe, just staggering -- then there is their actions vs words(party-planks) to consider: it would not be untrue to say that the Republican Party, in the last 16-years, has done nothing to further its stated goals.
I think Lanza was drugged in a similar manner that the Charles Manson family was, but controlled not by Manson. I think it was someone well connected to Ayers or Soros programmed him and sent him on mission.
Democrats are the slime of the Earth champing at the bit so to speak for another murderfest crisis to exploit.
“And they fully intend to arrange it.”
Newtown. No cameras, no bodies, fake crisis actor smiling before the cameras rolled caught on tape, and a coroner who does not know what kind of caliber bullet entered the “bodies” of those kids.
Violent video games are hardly the cause of problems. They let people vent frustration, rather than let it build.
The "non descript government operative" has a name.
It's Professor Raoul.
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