But in the next two weeks, the White House will unveil a new gun-control effort in which it will urge Congress to strengthen current laws, which now allow some mentally unstable people, such as alleged Arizona shooter Jared Loughner, to obtain certain assault weapons, in some cases without even a background check.
What’s shaping up, it would seem, is that we’re going to get some kind of NICS bill out of this, like we did after Virginia Tech. The risk is, what else are we going to get with it?
Thanks to read Mike and Red Five X for the pointer.
risk…possibly reward (sue me for being an optomist)- what about a CCW reciprocity amendment. Im pretty sure it has the votes in the house and this time around it may have the votes in the senate as well. It is well known that Sen. Thune is going to re-introduce the amendment and this may look like his oppurtunity
How about the police do their jobs and not ignore the dozen or so red flags this guy was waving? The NICS check only works when they arrest and convict people.
“..current laws, which now allow some mentally unstable people..”, current laws DO bar people with documented mental issues from buying and possessing firearms. Failing to report these issues to NICS and failing to enforce the ban on ownership and underfunding of mental programs is what allows them to own guns
Time to engage a little. my dad leans left and subscribes to Newsweek. Will have to educate him.
If this kid was making threats to kill people, why the hell didn’t Sheriff Dupnik’s office charge him? A conviction would have cause him to fail NICS, then he would have just bought a street gun.
They better walk very slowly with this stuff. If they truly get the NRA worked up we can almost count on many more being replaced in 2012.
Wow, Obama really wants to add mental health confidentiality to the health care debate?
He wants all the “Mothers of Depressed Kids”-type groups to oppose him before an election?
Why doesn’t he just invite the press to watch him pop a pregnant lady in the stomach!
Lots of ways to turn this debate around to our advantage, don’t really think they thought this one through…
We have to see how this goes. It might be something as minor as using a larger carrot and bigger stick to try to get states to report mental health records. If you threw us a few bones on top of that, I wouldn’t complain about the bill.
What we have to worry about is new prohibition being added. There’s a strong possibility they might count drug convictions as disabling offenses, for instance, which is unacceptable, because a lot of people who don’t use drugs today got busted for pot when they were young.
can’t you scrub some convictions though? (Is not a law expert) -if drugs become legal then maybe you can do that…
well, with all the talk about slipping in stuff, I say we slip in CCW reciprocity AND Hughes amendment repeal…
What else you get depends on what pro-gun congresscritters are willing to vote for, based on what what their voters think. There might well be trades people are willing to make. Including a line that says the phrase “‘Sporting Purpose’ as used in any firearm law shall be construed to include” something like “any firearm used or legally allowed for use in hunting in any state, possession or territory, or any firearm commonly or suitable for use in any organized event that attracts at least 100 competitors in at least two different states over the last 5 years” would be something I’d think might be interesting.
We can’t keep track of the millions of illegal aliens crossing back and forth across our borders… some or many carrying guns and other weapons, but some politicians think a few more gun laws will work?
I’ve got an idea, let’s outlaw killing people except in cases of self defense… if only Arizona or the federal government had laws in place to make it illegal to kill someone else… the whole tragedy in Arizona could have been avoided! (tongue-in-cheek)
Dann in Ohio
I agree, depending on what exactly the wording is this might be fine, or it could turn really bad.
I think this could be a good place to press for national reciprocity on carry permits, just to clarify that a person who’s a good guy in one state is a good guy in all states.
You can’t really slip things into bills… amendments still have to be voted on. That works both for and against us.
Pyro: What are cops supposed to do?
“Red flags” aren’t crimes, are they?
Did he ever actually do anything, before the shooting, that was a felony (or would have resulted in a conviction, at least)?
“Being creepy and maybe a little crazy” isn’t illegal – hell, it’s not even enough to get you adjudicated crazy. Which is probably for the best, since if it was you can bet your ass it’d be used as a weapon against Those Bad People.
You know, people like you and me.
I found myself having to read part of the healthcare form bill. It was totally impossible to even get a general idea what it did without a huge amount of work, as it was composed of line after line of “strike the 3rd word in 14USC 11 4a6” and “Change the second ‘may’ to ‘shall’ in section b4 of regulation blah”. For pages.
Essential the only way to see what it did was to print out every section it modified and then manually make the thousands of edits. This should never be allowed, but since it is, it has potential.
The question we need to ask is: are we fighting for the rights only of current gun owners, or for the rights of all Americans?
Put it differently: would you accept a deal whereby all restrictions on current gun owners were lifted, up to and including open carry of automatic weapons–and in return, everyone not currently owning a firearm would be banned for life?
Your answer should be not no, but hell no. Sadly, some of the responses I’ve seen here cause me to wonder.
We should not be willing to trade expanding the category of prohibited person for anything.
You can slip things into bills.
You can most definitively slip shit into bills. Even deem them passed and sign them into law.
Month’s later we are still finding shit in 0bamacare.
Need I remind you about passengers getting locked into boxes onto Amtrak?
search-fu this phrase:
@Sigivald
Unless I’m mistaken, he had made death threats to people, and apparently it was severe enough that police had to remove him from class at one point. I’m not laying all the blame on the police, but it looks like he made the leap from simply rambling crazy things to direct threats. Maybe not a felony conviction, but he was known to police at any rate. I’m also reading he made threats by phone, and they had made trips to his house before.
My point is it looks like the police had enough contact with him that something should have been done, but the sheriff spent all his time blaming Rush Limbaugh.
If the GOP and the NRA have any input, and if they have any chutzpa, we should either strike down “sporting purposes”, or at the very least insert language into the National Instant Criminal Background Check System to truly make it a national check.
There’s no reason at all I can’t buy a gun while out of state when we have a national background check.
You got that in the health care bill because it was drafted by congressional staffers and lobbyists, and then introduced and voted on before anyone could actually read it.
Getting rid of the sporting purposes would take a few sentences. This kind of legislation isn’t amenable to the same kind of trickery unless we can get someone in the GOP to bury it in some other bill without anyone noticing. Good luck convincing them to do that.
One thing that could be added would be an appeal process to have your name removed from any list inhibiting one from obtaining a firearm.
It should also have a provision that if Congress does not fund said appeal process, then the mere act of filing an appeal removes one’s name from said list.
“amendments still have to be voted on. ”
Like the Hughes amendment was?
In seriousness though, this needs to be watched closely. It may be an opportunity to get something good without really giving anything up. If they just strengthen the mechanisms behind the existing prohibitions, there’s a bunch of stuff we could try attaching. The Thune amendment and dealer sales regardless of residence seem to be the most obvious possibilities.
I was thinking more of negotiating the wording and points pre-vote than slipping in amendments. If we could push the Reps to sit down with the Dems and iron out new gun laws, period, it might put these things to rest for awhile and give us some stability. The Dems want to look compassionate, and we want reason. I think there’s some ground to play with there. They know they can’t push too hard without a big backlash, the people are against it as shown be the carry movement passing all over the country and the MacDonald ruling.
People might want to look at getting rid of the “for sporting purposes” thing since the new ATF shotgun study is out and it looks like they want to ban importation of “non-sporting purpose” shotguns, which, of course, includes ones with pistol grips and magazines.
I expect lots of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
I think I would accept a 3 yr prohibition of purchase by anyone who was committed against their will and determined to be a potential threat to others. (Not necessarily to themselves).
I think 3 yrs would help determine if the incident was just a random misinterpretation of a lone event vs. an ongoing psychotic issue.