“Cracking an Impasse” is politispeak for “compromise,” which is NRA-speak for “giving up something precious.”
“I’ve got to tell you candidly, I don’t consider background checks to be gun control. I think it’s just commonsense,” Toomey said. “If you pass a criminal background check, you get to buy a gun, no problem. It’s the people who fail a criminal or a mental health background check that we don’t want to have a gun.”
“Common sense,” I presume, is Toomey-speak for “I got elected in a democrat district, and I really, really like being in the Senate, so…”
And lo! It was good. And the morning and the evening were his first term.
“I think what the senator is likely considering now is how does he establish a firm positive place in the broader electorate as his term goes on, eventually to reelection in 2016?”
In a state like Pennsylvania, where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than 1 million, Toomey will need to appeal to suburban moderate and independent voters in order to win again.
I gather the actual text of this “compromise” bill is nowhere to be seen, having probably not been written yet. Which means all we have to go on is scuttlebutt, and there’s plenty of room for further “compromise” since the bill itself will be introduced at the last instant as an amendment to the amended amendment, or something equally incomprehensible and nefarious. When the real language is introduced as an amendment, it’s usually time to hide the silverware.
This “compromise” bill will supposedly mandate background checks for criminal and mental illness records at all gun show and online sales, exempting private transfers. Rumor has it there’s a kiss on the forehead after the gentle rape in the form of relaxed interstate sales and armed travel restrictions. That’ll maybe be enough to get dems to vote against the amendment, which would…hell, I don’t know what that would do. Probably that language won’t show up anyway.
But one of the key things gun-grabbers badly wanted out of this session is very much intact – “Mental health background checks.” What does that even mean? It’s not really new, but the progs have cried for it with every other utterance for the past four months. It’s been done, in the past, in a very slipshod manner if at all, with states apparently not being very zealous in sending records to the NICS registry. How the feds propose to fix that is quite a mystery.
The prospect of the federal government deciding who’s too mentally ill to be granted permission to exercise fundamental rights is a bit chilling here at the Secret Lair. “Criminal background” is cut-and-dried – it may be unjust, but at least you know. But at what level will some unaccountable ATF bureaucrat set the “mental health” threshold? There are sketchy reports of people in NY having their licenses pulled and being ordered to turn their guns in to the state because they have prescriptions for anti-anxiety meds. There are supposedly laws against those records being made available to law enforcement, but laws are only for the little people. Especially if it saves just one child’s life.
H/T to Vanderboegh.
Thanks for sharing the gentleman’s work.
I’m now living in a place where records are kept of the sites I visit, and a visit to that gentleman’s site (which I used to read every day) would likely result in me having lots of my things taken away from me.
Joel, I seem to remember fairly recently you nailed the mechanics of this straight-out-of-chapter-two-of-The-Gulag-Archipelago sort of enabling idea. You said something essentially just like the following (forgive me…working from memory):
“Remember how all those new taxes were supposed to soak only the rich? Congratulations, you’re rich!”
Never heard it said better, nor more succinctly. And so it is, of course, under (all) other forms of podkulachnik-manufacturing acts, certainly to include the topic at hand here:
“You know how we all agreed that the mentally unstable shouldn’t have guns? Good on you for being a fine, upstanding, rule-o’-law kinda guy. Now: congratulations, you’re cracked! Hand ’em over.”
One would think that, given the recent frothing frenzy and the “anyone who even thinks about a gun is unstable” invective flying around, that this would be obvious to everyone…but hell, I still run into people who think that they could never be “a drug criminal” because–get this–they don’t use or sell drugs.
Maybe we could use a new definition of “law-abiding citizen”. To be a “law-abiding citizen”, you are either a) a liar, because it is simply no longer physically possible, or you are b) dead, because that is ultimately what the law requires of you.
WRT NY pulling permits over anti-anxiety prescriptions: Hypothetically, taking my guns away would make me MUCH more anxious, meaning I would require a higher dose. Who gets the bill for the increase?
Tangentially, let’s talk about weapons and workplace policy. Oh, wait. I’m not allowed to talk about our policies any more. Nevermind.
Kevin – you may remember Solzhenitsyn mentioning article 58 ?
And in case anything wasn’t covered there – the rest is here.
Articles 59 through 108 cover “crimes against the order of government”. ‘Nuff said there – I suppose…
There’s a point where this shit is only grasped at – and somewhere later it may be codified. Among many things – this certainly constitutes ‘codified’.
Cursed machine to a halt indeed.