Why it Failed

Thursday 18 April 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

With the tears of liberals across the land flowing freely due to the smackdown so-called “common sense” gun control legislation received yesterday after the insisted upon “national conversation” concerning gun violence in the wake of the Newtown massacre, many, at least those who aren’t knee jerkingly blaming it on political cowardice or the NRA’s iron grip on the DC establishment, are wondering how an emotional appeal to minimizing violence failed so miserably. Senator Mike Lee in USA Today:

The Toomey-Manchin amendment admirably attempted to carve out certain protections for gun owners, but today’s carve-outs are tomorrow’s loopholes. The current “gun show loophole” was itself once considered a legitimate carve-out that protected certain private sales.

The amendment also took an incremental step toward universal background checks, which, as a Justice Department memo written earlier this year suggested, are effective only when coupled with a national registration system. Admittedly, the Toomey-Manchin plan prohibited a national registry. Yet it required a massive expansion of gun ownership data collected by federally licensed dealers to which the government has access.

After all, you cannot track all gun sales without tracking all gun owners. But the government has no business monitoring constitutionally protected activity, like gun ownership, any more than it has any business tracking what books Americans read or how often they attend church.

Gun-control advocates point to polls that show support for expanding background checks. But members of Congress do not get to vote on broad poll questions. They have to vote on specific legislation. If we are trying to minimize the burden on law-abiding gun owners while taking significant steps to prevent the next Sandy Hook, the Toomey-Manchin amendment, and the others that would have limited Second Amendment rights, failed both elements of that test. And that is why they failed to pass the Senate.

Most liberals won’t take any kind of legitimate intellectual explanation on why the bill failed at face value, but when people who agreed with an emotional approach to controlling gun crime it’s hard to expect that any kind of explanation would suffice because one can’t use reason to get someone to abandon an opinion they didn’t arrive at using reason.

2013-04-18  »  madlibertarianguy