“Is Anyone Surprised?”: Marco Rubio Pushes For Gun Loophole That Would Weaken Background Checks
Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) backed the NRA-supported “concealed carry reciprocity” Sunday morning, an initiative which would require concealed carry permits to be accepted universally across the country, forcing states with tighter permit restrictions to accept permit-holders from states with looser ones.
Rubio took the initiative one step further, saying on Fox News Sunday that if a person has undergone a background check for a concealed carry permit in one state, that person shouldn’t necessarily have to undergo another background check to buy a gun in another state.
RUBIO: If you have a concealed weapons permit, you do a background check. I have no problem with that. But are they going to honor that in all 50 states? If someone goes to another state to buy a gun do I have to undergo another background check, or will my concealed weapons permit be de facto proof that I am not a criminal? These are the sorts of things I hope we’ll talk about.
Rubio’s comments ignore that the requirements for concealed carry permits vary from state to state, and that a person can commit a criminal act after they have received a concealed carry permit. Plus, permit issuers don’t always catch criminals or the mentally unstable — a 2012 investigation that found Rubio’s home state of Florida did not check the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System when issuing concealed carry permits, overlooking the 1.6 million records of Americans with mental illnesses the database contains.
The Senator on Sunday also admitted that though he hadn’t read the Manchin-Toomey gun bill, which will expand background checks to include most gun sales, in its entirety, he was skeptical of it because it would impede on the rights of law-abiding gun owners and would “do nothing to keep criminals from buying” guns. He said focusing on gun control wasn’t the way to prevent future shootings like the one in Newtown — instead, he said the country needed to focus on addressing violence and mental health issues in general, citing the decline of the American family as a reason for increased gun violence in the country.
Rubio’s comments are in line with the NRA’s position on gun control legislation: in a letter to the Senate, NRA Institute for Legislative Action Executive Director Chris Cox said Congress needed to “fix our broken mental health system” rather than “infringe upon the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding gun owners.” NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre has also made comments similar to Rubio’s, recently claiming Connecticut’s new gun laws have only made “the lawbooks bigger for the law-abiding people.” But Rubio’s statements aren’t surprising: in March, he joined a group of Republicans that threatened to block gun control legislation in the Senate.
By: Katie Valentine, Think Progress, April 14, 2013
“Pragmatic Determination”: Sandy Hook Parents Prove The Personal Still Has Power
Before she became a reluctant lobbyist, involuntarily versed in arcane Senate procedure, Nicole Hockley thought that strange word was spelled with an “S” — “closure,” not “cloture.”
But this was before the terrible day that Hockley and her fellow Sandy Hook parents refer to simply as 12/14, before Hockley’s 6-year-old son, Dylan, died in his teacher’s arms.
Now Hockley, a marketing consultant who once specialized in reducing carbon emissions but never dabbled in politics, can speak with fluency about the vote count on the motion to proceed.
“There were growing numbers who were opposing a move to cloture, and very few were standing up against that filibuster,” Hockley recalled of the grim situation when she and other Sandy Hook parents arrived in Washington, having hitched a ride on Air Force One after the president’s trip to Newtown, Conn.
It was a bittersweet perk. “Any other occasion on earth, riding on Air Force One would be the most amazing day of your life,” said Nelba Marquez-Greene, whose daughter Ana, 6, was killed. “But I was riding on Air Force One because my baby was shot in the chest and the neck.”
The Sandy Hook parents asked, deftly wielding the power conferred by tragedy, to meet directly with senators, not staff. But, focused more on gentle, private persuasion than public arm-twisting, they also took pains to conduct the meetings without the customary media entourage. In all, they met with more than a quarter of the Senate, sharing the stories of their dead children and pressing, at the least, for a chance to have the gun proposals debated on the floor.
And by all accounts, the parents of Sandy Hook Promise played an influential, perhaps decisive, role in achieving that goal on Thursday morning, with 68 senators — including 16 Republicans — voting to proceed with debate.
To speak with Sandy Hook parents is to grasp anew the power of the personal in politics. Money may be motivating, fear of losing the next election even more so.
But politicians are people, too. No matter where you may be on the political spectrum in general or the matter of gun control in particular, you cannot help but be moved by the rawness of these mothers’ anguish and the force of their pragmatic determination.
“We’re the middle,” said Francine Wheeler, fingering a necklace in the form of a treble clef, a testament to her slain son Benjamin’s perfect pitch and which contains some of his ashes. “We’re the middle that doesn’t want to infringe on anybody’s Second Amendment but wants to keep kids safe.”
The mothers handed out glossy postcards with heartbreakingly beautiful photographs of their murdered children — Ana Marquez-Greene in her poufy pigtails, Dylan Hockley grinning in a Superman T-shirt, doe-eyed Benjamin Wheeler with his older brother.
To say this is not to be naive about the limits of the capacity of grief to persuade. The threat of a less-than-perfect grade from the National Rifle Association remains potent. The NRA gave lawmakers a pass on this procedural vote; not so, it threatened in a letter, with the next cloture vote, on whether to move to final passage. Unlike most procedural votes, that step will be scored as a “key vote,” the gun group advised, ominously.
And once — if — the Senate acts, the Republican-controlled House presents a potentially insurmountable hurdle. “But they’re parents,” Wheeler said. “The House has lots of parents, lots of grandparents, and I think they’re going to be willing to listen. I have faith that they will.” Wheeler was asked by President Obama to deliver his weekly radio address.
Political activism was not on these mothers’ agendas — not before the massacre and certainly not afterward. “After the murder, brushing my teeth was on my radar,” said Marquez-Greene.
Yet, she concluded, she had little choice but to become involved, “so you don’t have to interview three more mothers two years from now who buried their children due to gun violence.”
To those who dismiss the pending proposal as a pitifully thin slice of a loaf, who mourn the absence of limits on magazine capacity or assault weapons, who fear that the background check rules will remain too porous, the mothers have a, well, maternal response.
“When you have a baby and they start learning to walk and they take that first step and it’s not perfect, do you say to them, ‘Sit down!’ because it wasn’t perfect?” Marquez-Greene asked. “It’s the same with this. This is baby steps, incremental steps. We’re taking the first one now, and we’re going to keep walking.”
By: Ruth Marcus, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 12, 2013
“Be Reasonable”: The NRA Would Rather Stand By Their Guns Than Their Word
It is time for the National Rifle Association to admit that universal background checks should include gun shows … kind of like they did in 1999 after Columbine.
In 1999, Wayne LaPierre told Fox News, when asked if he was protecting gun shows, “That’s ridiculous … the fact is that we’re supporting the bill in the Senate that provides a check on every sale at every gun show, no loopholes at all.” The NRA took out ads in papers across the country in a campaign entitled “Be Reasonable” and wrote: “We believe it’s reasonable to provide for instant background checks at gun shows, just like gun shops and pawn shops.”
Why won’t the NRA stick by their statements? Because they would rather stick by their guns.
One simple reason: They were being cute back then and they are being cute now. They rail against fees, or records, or private citizens getting hurt. It is all baloney.
They will not admit that according to a New York Times-CBS News poll over 90 percent of Americans want more background checks; they won’t admit that criminals are kept from buying guns; they won’t admit that 20 to 40 percent of gun buyers escape the scrutiny because they don’t go to gun shops.
They deny reality every day.
They can take away their “A ratings” of Sens. Joe Manchin and Pat Toomey. They can rail against those 16 Republicans who refused to go along with a filibuster to prevent the Senate from acting. They can claim they are worried about a “slippery slope” on gun control.
But it all rings hollow to those families from Columbine, from Newtown, from Aurora. It all rings hollow to those innocent bystanders who have been gunned down in street violence, or who have died when families are torn apart, or those returning veterans with easy access to a gun who have committed suicide at the rate of three a day.
It is long past time for the NRA to do what is right for America’s families – “be reasonable” should be the cry Wayne LaPierre hears every day.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, April 12, 2013
“A Defeat For The NRA”: Despite Threats, Filibuster Broken And Gun Debate Begins
The Senate has voted 68-31 to open a debate on compromise gun legislation that expands background checks. The bill will be based on a compromise between senators Pat Toomey (R-PA) and Joe Manchin (D-WV), both of whom currently have an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association (NRA) gun lobby.
The NRA threatened to “score” Thursday’s vote against lawmakers’ ratings, hoping to kill the bill before it was even written. But 17 Republicans joined all the Democrats in the Senate except Mark Pryor (D-AR) and Mark Begich (D-AK) for cloture to prevent a filibuster from derailing the debate. The Washington Post‘s Ed O’Keefe points out that 21 of the “aye” votes came from senators with NRA ratings A- or higher.
Several family members of those killed in the Newtown massacre four months ago were on hand to witness the vote in the Senate chamber.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (R-NV) took to the floor after the vote.
“The hard work starts now,” he said.
“There are powerful feelings about each of these proposals — both strong support and strong opposition,” Reid said. “But whichever side you are on, we ought to be able to agree to engage in a thoughtful debate about these measures.”
He added that he hopes ”a few senators don’t spoil everything,” referencing the threat by 14 senators including Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rand Paul (R-KY) to filibuster the bill.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is one of those senators. On Thursday he said, ”This bill is a clear overreach that will predominantly punish and harass our neighbors, friends, and family.”
The debate is expected to last for weeks, with the NRA continuing to score even procedural votes.
Though about one-third of the Senate voted against even having a debate, polls show that around 90 percent of Americans support expanding background checks.
“Those two leaders stepping up is a very good way to start,” said Mary Landrieu (D-LA), who is seeking re-election next year in red state Louisiana. “How it ends, I don’t know.”
This morning, Congressman Peter King (R-NY) told The Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent that he thought the bill had a chance of passing the House of Representatives if it makes it out of the Senate.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, April 11, 2013
“Patently Clear”: It’s Easy To Understand, Background Checks Save Lives
On October 21, 2012, Radcliffe Haughton killed three women, including his wife, Zina Haughton, and wounded four others at a Wisconsin day spa before turning his gun on himself. He purchased the handgun used in the shooting without a background check from a private seller he met through the website Armslist.com.
Two days earlier, Houghton had become the subject of a domestic violence restraining order that prohibited him from purchasing or possessing firearms. With the restraining order in place, he could not have purchased the weapon from a licensed dealer. Such dealers are required by law to conduct background checks on gun buyers.
It is patently clear that background checks save lives. Background checks conducted by federally licensed firearms dealers (FFLs) have prevented more than two million prohibited purchasers—convicted felons, wife beaters, and other dangerous individuals—from buying guns. Additionally, studies show that in the 14 states that currently require background checks for handgun sales, there are 49 percent fewer gun suicides, 38 percent fewer women are shot to death by an intimate partner and the firearms trafficking rate is 48 percent lower.
That’s why more than 90 percent of Americans—and 74 percent of NRA members—support universal background checks.
Faced with the reality of that polling data, the NRA has concocted a boogeyman about universal background checks leading to a national registry of gun buyers and then forcible confiscation of privately-held firearms.
The problem is this claim is hogwash. New York Senator Chuck Schumer’s Fix Gun Checks Act of 2013 would utilize a record-keeping system that’s already been in place for 45 years (without any harm to gun buyers). Private sellers would conduct background checks through FFLs, who would then maintain paper records of these sales.
The federal government completely purges the information it receives from the dealer to run the background check after just 24 hours and the United States Code expressly prohibits the federal government from maintaining a national registry of gun owners. Moreover, the Supreme Court recently affirmed that there is a constitutional right to have a firearm in the home.
The NRA’s conspiracy theory about “confiscation” deserves to be put in the same category as FEMA camps and black helicopters: Pure unadulterated fantasy. In the wake of the horrific tragedy at Newtown, Americans deserve a real debate on universal background checks, and an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor.
By: Joshua Horwitz, Executive Director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, U. S. News and World Report, April 10, 2013
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