House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) has scheduled his committee to return early from recess. His panel will meet September 4 and as usual, Democrats are ignoring effective gun control by targeting all gun owners whether or not they are law-abiding citizens.
The committee has slated three firearm-related bills: extreme risk protection orders, a ban on magazines with a capacity over 10 rounds, and prohibition for people convicted of hate crimes. A hearing on banning so-called “assault weapons” is scheduled for later in the month.
In the meantime, Nadler is spending his time attacking Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) due to his refusal to join the anti-gun circus that endorses any and every new gun control law that comes along, regardless of how effective they may or may not be.
Larry Keane of the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) says that Nadler is more interested in holding a kangaroo court that will be provided hundreds of hours of mainstream media coverage than in solving anything.
“Someone needs to explain to Rep. Nadler and others,” writes Keane, “that the first bill introduced with the most emotional pull is not always the one that would help address the root causes of criminal activities.”
A perfect example is the shooting in Aurora, IL in which a disgruntled former employee killed five workers at the Henry Pratt plant. Nadler and the rest of Democrat cronies think their bills limiting ammunition, banning assault weapons and Red Flag protection orders would have prevented such a tragedy.
The first question that needs to be answered before any more laws are considered should be: “If laws already in existence were not enforced, why would adding one more law help anything?”
Proper enforcement of several existing laws would have prevented that killing spree in Aurora. The shooter was a convicted felon who should have never been allowed to own a weapon.
The murderer was convicted of aggravated assault in Mississippi in 1995. According to police record, he bludgeoned and stabbed his girlfriend before his arrest. After serving less than three years of a five-year prison sentence he was arrested six times by Aurora Police for traffic and domestic violence issues.
Despite his convictions, the state issued him an Illinois Firearms Owner Identification Card (FOID) in 2014. Kristen Ziman, Chief of Police in Aurora said the man’s past convictions “would not necessarily have shown up on a criminal background check conducted for the FOID card.”
Had the man not applied for a concealed carry permit his criminal past would have never shown up on the radar in Illinois. He was denied a carry permit but the Illinois State Police failed to follow through by recovering the firearm the man owned.
Keane said, “The result of this poorly thought-out system is that the murderer took a gun he should have never owned, and the State Police knew he possessed, into his workplace. Moments after being fired, he began killing his co-workers.”
All this occurred in a state the Giffords Law Center gave a B+ rating for its strict gun control measures. The Law Center ranked Illinois eight in the nation for “strengthening extreme risk protection orders, violence intervention programs and extended firearms purchase waiting periods. Illinois has some of the strictest gun laws on the books.”
Giffords has no rating for ‘oversight to ensure that those laws work’. If it did, the state of Illinois would get an F.
So, what did the state of Illinois do when its stellar gun control laws didn’t work? Governor J.B. Pritzker signed a duplicative law to regulate firearms retailers already subject to federal regulation.
This kind of backwards thinking permeates the Democratic Party. You can see this in the latest crop of 2020 hopefuls platforms.
California Sen. Kamala Harris promises if she’s elected her first action would be to ban “assault weapons” by executive order. This despite the fact most crimes are committed with handguns, not AR15s.
Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar wants universal background checks, ignoring the fact such checks failed to stop the Illinois murderer.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has called for the U.S. to follow in the footsteps of Australia and New Zealand with a national mandatory buyback program on semi-automatic weapons.
Apparently, Sanders hasn’t heard that the people of New Zealand may have applauded the program but rejected it when it came to giving up their guns.
September 4th will not be about gun laws that work but rather one more veiled attempt to rob law-abiding U.S. citizens of their Constitutional rights.
