Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition
June 11th, 2007Link I
Senior Democrats have reached agreement with the National Rifle Association on what could be the first federal gun-control legislation since 1994, a measure to significantly strengthen the national system that checks the backgrounds of gun buyers. The sensitive talks began in April, days after a mentally ill gunman killed 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech University. The shooter, Seung Hui Cho, had been judicially ordered to submit to a psychiatric evaluation, which should have disqualified him from buying handguns. But the state of Virginia never forwarded that information to the federal National Instant Check System (NICS), and the massacre exposed a loophole in the 13-year-old background-check program.
Under the agreement, participating states would be given monetary enticements for the first time to keep the federal background database up to date, as well as penalties for failing to comply. To sign on to the deal, the powerful gun lobby won significant concessions from Democratic negotiators in weeks of painstaking talks. Individuals with minor infractions in their pasts could petition their states to have their names removed from the federal database, and about 83,000 military veterans, put into the system by the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2000 for alleged mental health reasons, would have a chance to clean their records. The federal government would be permanently barred from charging gun buyers or sellers a fee for their background checks. In addition, faulty records such as duplicative names or expunged convictions would have to be scrubbed from the database.
Link II
President George Bush’s proposed reform of the US’s crisis-hit immigration system, intended to be the administration’s lasting legacy, was in tatters yesterday. His bill, destroyed by a combination of Republicans and Democrats in the Senate, highlights the extent of his weakness and isolation, even though he still has a year and a half left in office. Immigration is a hugely divisive issue in the US - the hottest political topic after Iraq - and there have been repeated attempts over the years to fix it. There are an estimated 12 million to 20 million illegal immigrants in the US, mainly from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America.
If the Democratic Party and the NRA can work together on sensible gun reform, why can’t both parties and immigrants rights groups?
I guess immigrants rights groups don’t have enough guns to take out the government? Maybe if they took out our toilets, the Congress would get something done!