While the headlines are blaring about Hillary Clinton’s campaign footing the bill for the infamous “Trump Dossier,” anti-gunners haven’t allowed themselves to be distracted in their push to exploit the Las Vegas mass shooting to push an agenda that would not have prevented the tragedy.
Clinton and the Democratic National Committee just might be in big trouble, depending upon where the story goes, but none of that seems to have registered with anti-gunners bent on eroding the rights of law-abiding citizens.
Clinton campaigned on gun control (and lost) and Democrats have it as part of their party platform.
In an email blast, anti-gun billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s “Everytown for Gun Safety” is angry that Congress has “done nothing since Las Vegas to enact common sense gun laws.”
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
And what strategies is this organization pushing?
They want Congress to reject the proposed Hearing Protection Act, which would ease access to suppressors (“silencers”) that are so rarely used in crime that nobody apparently keeps a statistic.
They want to defeat the proposed Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act that would require states to honor the concealed carry permits and licenses issued by all other states.
Of course, Everytown also wants recipients of its email to kick in some money. This time around, they are asking for $9 “or whatever you can” afford to send. And they also disingenuously remind recipients about “gun violence that kills 93 people every day” without acknowledging that at least two-thirds of those fatalities are suicides. Using the inflated figure that combines homicides, suicides and accidents creates the impression that a bloody epidemic of violence is under way.
If anti-gunners want to talk about crime, then it might be instructive to discuss the failure of strict gun control laws like the “universal background check” statute in Washington State. A high-profile shootout between an undercover cop and a pair of would-be illegal gun sellers last week is getting lots of attention in the Seattle media.
According to the Seattle Times, the two suspects allegedly were willing to sell a handgun stolen from the home of a police officer in a parking lot exchange in the city of Kent, south of Seattle. There are no background checks when guns are stolen, even from a police officer’s home, and there would have been no check in this illicit sale, either.
One of the suspects was shot and the other one was struck by a car as he tried to run from the scene on foot, according to the newspaper. It comes as no surprise to gun rights activists that the suspects had criminal histories which would have prevented them from legally possessing a firearm.
As for the Las Vegas killer, he passed background checks while acquiring the guns over an extended period. He had no criminal background that might have raised questions during any transaction.
