WASHINGTON, June 16 (Reuters) – The lead Republican negotiator in U.S. Senate efforts to craft a bipartisan gun safety bill walked out of the talks on Thursday, while the lead Democrat remained optimistic that lawmakers could vote on legislation before leaving for a two-week July 4 recess.
“It’s fish or cut bait,” Senator John Cornyn said after hours of negotiations that included his fellow Republican Senator Thom Tillis and Democratic Senators Chris Murphy and Kyrsten Sinema.
“I don’t know what they have in mind, but I’m through talking,” Cornyn said.
However, Tillis and Murphy later said the talks were close to reaching agreement and added that legislative text for a bill could emerge in coming days……………..
The left are throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks before they lose their stranglehold in November. Their behavior is reactionary and it’s going to get more insane, more sinister, and more hysterical.
— THE Red-Headed libertarian™ (@TRHLofficial) June 7, 2022
Republican Rep.-elect Mayra Flores says Democrats should take her victory in a special congressional election in Texas as a warning sign to stop taking Hispanic voters for granted.
Flores, who won a contest Tuesday for an open seat House seat along the nation’s southern border in the Rio Grande Valley, made history as the first Mexican-born congresswoman. And she’s the first Republican to win in the heavily Hispanic district since it was created a decade ago………
I bet he’s weighing the political negatives of the deal vis-à-vis the number of calls he’s getting telling him where to go and how to get there.
It doesn’t sound like Texas Sen. John Cornyn isn’t ready to throw in the towel on the Senate negotiations, but some hangups are apparently starting to emerge as Democrats and Republicans move from a “framework” to actual legislation.
Wednesday morning Cornyn met with a group of reporters to give them an update on the status of the bill, and Cornyn suggested that a deal might not be done this week because of a couple of “issues” that are popping up, starting with the language around giving
Cornyn: “One of the issues has to do is whether the funds that we will vote for will be available to states that don't have red flag laws, but do have crisis intervention programs and things like mental health courts, veterans courts, assisted outpatient treatment programs.”
In other words, New York goobermint is going obstruct every step along the way. Seems they forgot that D.C. tried that after the ‘first’ Heller case and it got them ‘Heller 2’ which basically turned D.C. into not just a ‘shall issue’, but you will issue CCW permits.
NEW YORK — The Supreme Court is on the verge of ruling on a case that could overturn New York state’s gun carry law. Records obtained by CBS2 show as many as 20,000 more guns could inundate the streets of the Big Apple, following such a decision.
But a high-ranking source tells CBS2’s Marcia Kramer it could take the city years to comply.
Here’s the good news: the NYPD already has a four-point plan to try to limit both the number of guns and the places it will be legal to bring them if the high court overturns our strict gun laws. The bad news is that more people may seek to get guns.
“The NYPD has always been quite careful about who they give permission to to carry guns and that has really kept the number of people carrying guns, lawfully, way down,” said Richard Aborn of the Citizens Crime Commission.
Aborn is right when he says the NYPD has been careful, and some say admirably stingy, when it comes to issuing gun permits that allow New Yorkers to carry concealed weapons on the streets of the city.
CBS2 has learned that at present only about 1,700 people have the right to carry a gun when they leave home and 1,400 more have carry licenses issued by other counties that need New York City endorsement to carry in the five boroughs.
But with the Supreme Court poised to overturn New York’s strict gun carry laws, the big worry is the people who have been issued permits to have guns in their homes, which can also be used on a firing range. Conceivably, they could be turned into concealed carry permits because of the Supreme Court decision.
CBS2 has learned that:
16,462 city residents have so called “premise residence” permits
773 have “premise business” permits
2,403 have “carry guard” permits that can be carried while working but have to be left at the place of business at the end of the shift
John Miller, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, told CBS2 in a memo that a ruling against New York, “… does not mean that you wake up the morning of the ruling and the premises permit magically turns into a carry.”
Depending on the ruling, it could take New York a year or two to implement, Miller says, especially if the court allows New York to limit the places a gun can be carried, so-called “sensitive places.”
“The question becomes: what constitutes a sensitive place? So I think there are some obvious ones. Places where large numbers of people gather. Mass transit, the subway, stadiums, theaters, movie theaters, probably schools, probably houses of worship,” Aborn said.
“Is it going to be Miss Kitty’s on ‘Gunsmoke’? Check your guns at the door?,” Miller asks. “The reality is that other states that have gone to unrestricted carry licenses have had a shared experience of people who can’t bring them in certain places, leaving them in cars and the guns being stolen in car break-ins. That just recycles legal guns into the hands of criminals.”
“There is a question about whether or not the city will be able to restrict people from locking guns in their car. That’s important because the thing we don’t want to do is encourage an increase in car break-ins,” Aborn added.
So if New York loses in the Supreme Court, which many here think is a foregone conclusion, the NYPD and the mayor would have to figure out how to adjust their permit rules. Aborn says another concern is whether relaxed permit rules will spark a demand for new permits from people who now don’t own a weapon.
Pennsylvania Republicans have opened impeachment proceedings against ultra-progressive Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, accusing him of a “willful refusal” to tackle “unchecked violent crime.”
A trio of Keystone State House representatives announced the drastic move Monday while also unveiling a website, StopKrasner.com, for crime victims to detail their horror stories.
“We recognize it is an extraordinary measure — but the actions that the DA has taken are extraordinary,” said one of the trio, Rep. Josh Kail…….
On Tuesday, South Carolinians went to the polls to decide if incumbents, including Rep. Tom Rice, could withstand a primary after invoking the wrath of former President Donald Trump. Rep. Rice, who represents South Carolina’s 7th Congressional District, lost his seat, after Russell Fry, the Trump-backed challenger, earned more than 50 percent of the vote, avoiding a runoff.
Decision Desk HQ projects Russell Fry (@RussellFrySC) is the winner of the Republican nomination for U.S. House District 7 in South Carolina, unseating incumbent Rep. Tom Rice.
Rep. Rice had earned the former president’s ire as one of 10 Republican House members who had voted to impeach Trump in January of last year, just as he was about to leave office.
There will not be a new federal “assault weapons” ban this year. Or any year in the near future.
It’s not simply because of Senate Republican opposition either. The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives won’t pass one. It hasn’t even tried to since the party took control in 2018.
In fact, there hasn’t been a new assault weapons ban in 25 years. Only seven states and the District of Columbia have a ban in place at all. Some of those states, including New York and California, have tightened their prohibitions in recent years. But no state has passed a new ban in recent history.
Gun-control advocates haven’t given up on pushing the policy, though. And some top Democrats, including Texas gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke and Vice President Kamala Harris, have even advocated coupling a sales ban with a mandatory buyback.
But the hill to climb for successfully passing a new ban has just gotten steeper.
In the first major poll since the shootings in Uvalde and Buffalo, Quinnipiac University found support for an assault weapons ban actually dropped. It’s now at just 50 percent, which is the lowest level it has ever been since Quinnipiac started asking about a ban in 2013.
The newest finding puts support for banning assault weapons 17 points lower than its peak just a few years ago. It’s just one poll, of course, but others show a substantial drop in support since the national ban passed back in 1994. One of the oldest polls on a ban found support was up at 80 percent.
The Quinnipiac poll is telling beyond just the raw numbers too. In the wake of horrific shootings, such as the recent attacks in Buffalo and Uvalde, support for gun-control measures tends to increase significantly. For nearly every other policy Quinnipiac polled, that was the case. But not for an assault weapons ban.
And, again, it wasn’t just Republicans driving opposition to a ban. Independents also opposed the ban by a three-point margin.
It’s too early to say for sure this trend will continue. More polling will be needed to have confidence that’s the case. However, America has experienced a similar policy transformation in recent history.
Handguns were once the main focus of gun-control efforts. Brady United Against Gun Violence was initially called Handgun Control Inc. and once partnered with the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence which was initially called the National Coalition to Ban Handguns.
In 1959, Gallup found 60 percent of Americans favored a total ban on handguns. But, as time went by, that number began to fall. By 2021, the same poll found just 19 percent support. That’s even though handguns are by far the most common weapon used in homicides and other serious crimes.
That attitude shift likely had a lot to do with the increasing popularity of handguns among the general public. Multiple polls over the past decade or more indicate people buy guns primarily for self-defense. At the same time, handguns have surpassed rifles and shotguns as the best-selling category of firearms in the United States.
Assault weapons may be enjoying a similar effect. While “assault weapon” is a fairly nebulous term with a definition that varies from state to state, it’s usually crafted in a way to target guns like the AR-15 and Ak-47. The National Shooting Sports Foundation calls these guns “modern sporting rifles.”
In 2020, they estimated there were nearly 20 million AR-15s and similar firearms. They are the most popular rifles in the country, and the NRA has even dubbed the AR “America’s rifle.” More Americans own ARs than ever before and likely associate them more with home defense, hunting, and sport shooting than with crime, despite their presence in some of the highest-profile mass shootings.
That doesn’t mean further regulation of assault weapons is impossible. After all, handguns are more highly regulated than rifles or shotguns despite the minuscule support for a total ban on their sales. Similarly, support for age restrictions on purchasing assault weapons has polled very well in the wake of the recent shootings, and New York just implemented that change.
Perhaps that’s where the debate over AR-15s and other “assault weapons” will now focus. Because a total ban on sales is not in the cards anytime soon.
It was news that sent shudders through every person who supports the Second Amendment: ten Republican senators have signed on to a “framework” that will allegedly improve gun safety in America. You can guess who these RINOs are — it’s the same bunch who will always agree to limit American rights to keep up with their friends on the Democrat side of the aisle. And while there are a couple of good ideas in the framework, the rest of it is useless, harmful, and/or unconstitutional.
According to a statement from the bipartisan group of senators, they have an agreement in principle for legislation that includes “needed mental health resources, improves school safety and support for students, and helps ensure dangerous criminals and those who are adjudicated as mentally ill can’t purchase weapons[.]” More specifically, the senators have agreed on the following concepts, which I’ve listed along with my comments:
We could say that all mass shootings are inspired by hatred, but many are carried out by deranged individuals, susceptible to violence and possessing no clear and distinct political or religious motives. These disturbed, mentally unstable people are unhinged by the strain of the postmodern age and what they see and experience.
They are receptive to the influences of the perverse degeneration of the popular culture, media sensationalism, and the pursuit of celebrity status, even if they pay with their own lives to achieve the dubious notoriety they seek. Shooting rampages by these types of individuals may be the most common type of mass shootings, at least in the United States.
But there are other types of spree shootings, which are clearly of different varieties, especially those triggered by fanaticism or intense racial, ethnic, or political hatred.
Some shootings are motivated by Jihad and “home grown” Islamic radicalism. Others, perhaps the most odious, are the result of perverted political ideology and the increasing hatred boiling over from the atmosphere of racial and ethnic divisiveness and polarization of politics, largely created by the incitement of violence, directly or indirectly, by the political left and the propagandist media.
On May 14, 2022, Payton Gendron, an alleged “white supremacist,” shot and killed 10 people and injured three others at Tops Market in Buffalo, New York. The media has sensationalized this shooting not only to push for more gun control laws, but also because of the alleged “white supremacist” killer and his racial motivation. Now we are learning that a former FBI agent may have known of the gunman’s plan to commit mass murder, according to two law enforcement officials investigating the case.
According to the Buffalo News, the two law enforcement sources stated that at least six individuals had been communicating with the accused shooter in an online chat room and were invited by Gendron to read about his murderous plans and the target location about 30 minutes before the shooting. None of these individuals tipped the police or FBI prior to the shooting. No other information has been made available to the public from the two officials familiar with the investigation, the FBI, or the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Suffice to say, the FBI and media propagandists have been heavily the racial hatred narrative, the white supremacy of the shooter, and the fact the gunman used an AR-15. Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrat activist Beto O’ Rourke are, once again, pushing for banning “assault weapons,” especially the AR-15, and in the case of O’Rourke, calling for outright confiscation of those who already possess them legally.
Nothing has been said about much bigger societal problems, such as the increased polarization of America since the Obama administration and the incitement of violence by Democrats and the media — for example, calling rioters “peaceful protestors,” the gaslighting and justifying their criminal behavior, violence, looting and plundering, as reasonable social justice.
In fact, rioters advanced the leftist agenda of promoting chaos that the Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media exploit as a pretext to pass still more laws that affect not the criminal elements in society, but law-abiding gun owners and business people. At the same time, the orchestrated riots provide plunder for the looters, while the public and businesses aren’t protected.
We know that all resources available to the press were utilized for sustaining the constant barrage of negative propaganda. That this takes place in our United States, a nation with a purportedly free and independent press, is unconscionable. That a fifth column within the intelligence community was also deeply involved is abominable.
Where are the objective and intrepid investigative journalists of the mainstream media that should have been investigating these momentous omissions, these gaps in our public knowledge, in the study of criminal mass shooters and the societal factors that contribute to them? And when is the media finally going to admit that armed citizens could have stopped some of these mass murderers or, at the very least, diminished the number of casualties?
Some Republicans still have a spine
"Governor Tom Wolf today condemned Republicans in the House Judiciary Committee for refusing to move forward a package of commonsense bills that would help address the gun violence crisis facing Pennsylvania." https://t.co/elhtIcdFj8
— Firearms Policy Coalition (@gunpolicy) June 13, 2022
Sunday, a bipartisan group of Senators agreed to an expanded package of ‘common sense’ gun control measures. The Vichy Republican contingent consisted of Pat Toomey (PA), Susan Collins (ME), Lindsey Graham (SC), Thom Tillis (NC) and Bill Cassidy (LA) under the leadership, if I may be so bold as to use such a word, of John Cornyn (TX). My colleague Bonchie covered the deal in Republicans Prepare to Play the Sucker After ‘Gun Safety’ Bill Is Revealed. This is how he sums it up:
Here’s the thing. There is going to be another mass shooting. No matter how many laws we pass, evil people will get their hands on the tools necessary to commit evil acts. When that mass shooting occurs, Democrats are going to scream about how the last “gun safety” bill wasn’t enough and how we must “do something.” That “do something” will include confiscation and outright bans on common weaponry. By compromising now without laying a marker down they are willing to stand by, they are simply handing Democrats the leverage to take the whole pie the next time around.
The left-wing push to ban semiautomatic weapons is not going to end here. Republicans that don’t recognize that are being suckers.
Now Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy has released more detail on what is included in the deal, and “suckers” hardly does the Republican participants credit for their duplicity.
NEWS: We have a deal. Today a bipartisan group of 20 Senators (10 D and 10 R) is announcing a breakthrough agreement on gun violence – the first in 30 years – that will save lives.
2/ Major funding to help states pass and implement crisis intervention orders (red flag laws) that will allow law enforcement to temporarily take dangerous weapons away from people who pose a danger to others or themselves.
3/ Billions in new funding for mental health and school safety, including money for the national build out of community mental health clinics.
4/ Close the “boyfriend loophole”, so that no domestic abuser – a spouse OR a serious dating partner – can buy a gun if they are convicted of abuse against their partner.
5/ First ever federal law against gun trafficking and straw purchasing. This will be a difference making tool to stop the flow of illegal guns into cities.
6/ Enhanced background check for under 21 gun buyers and a short pause to conduct the check. Young buyers can get the gun only after the enhanced check is completed.
7/ Clarification of the laws regarding who needs to register as a licensed gun dealer, to make sure all truly commercial sellers are doing background checks.
8/ Will this bill do everything we need to end our nation’s gun violence epidemic? No. But it’s real, meaningful progress. And it breaks a 30 year log jam, demonstrating that Democrats and Republicans can work together in a way that truly saves lives.
9/ So grateful to @JohnCornyn @kyrstensinema @SenThomTillis @SenToomey @Sen_JoeManchin @SenBlumenthal @SenatorCollins @LindseyGrahamSC @ChrisCoons @TeamHeinrich @BillCassidy and others for their amazing work to get us this far.
10/ Drafting this law and passing it through both chambers will not be easy. We have a long way before this gets to the President’s desk. But with your help and activism, we can get this done. This time, failure cannot be an option.
2/ Red Flag laws are a civil rights non-starter as far as I’m concerned. Giving a disgruntled neighbor, a deranged leftist relative, or a vindictive current or former “partner” the ability to have your weapons confiscated while you bear the burden of proving you are not dangerous is antithetical to our system of justice. Above and beyond the Kafkaesque process, the procedure is a sham. A judge will not deny a “Red Flag” order and risk that person killing someone with a firearm. They are never giving your firearms back for the same reason. This is simply a backdoor for anti-gun activists to harass and intimidate gun owners. Any Republican who votes for this is not worthy of our support.
3/ I’m not convinced “community mental health clinics” do very much other than provide a sinecure purple-haired transgenders with an MSW degree. Be that as it may, linking these clinics to a bill ostensibly designed to prevent school shootings means that schools will be pressured to refer students to the clinics for evaluation and treatment. If they don’t, their reason for existence will be revealed as a fraud (SPOILER ALERT: it is). Those mental health referrals will be made by the same people who teach Critical Race Theory, make your elementary school student experiment with “pronouns,” and groom them towards transgenderism and the remainder of the alphabet soup of perversions. If we want more “community mental health clinics,” then authorize them independent of any gun control law. By the way, mental health people are pretty adamant that mental health is not a factor in the overwhelming majority of shootings. The problem is Evil, not crazy.
4/ If you want to understand what “closing the boyfriend loophole” opens the door to, check out what goes on in Title IX sexual harassment/assault hearings in colleges. Without a cohabitation requirement, you are fair game for any woman you went out with one time who wants revenge. If you feel in danger, get a restraining order and stay the hell away from the person. If you can’t qualify for a restraining order, then maybe vindictiveness, not personal safety, is your goal.
5/ Straw purchases are already illegal. Gun trafficking, unless you have a Federal Firearms License, is illegal. Without seeing an actual proposal, my best guess is that this will end the private sale of weapons, the so-called “gun show loophole” that the anti-gunners have been after for years.
6/ Other than the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), I don’t know of any other systems available for background checks that do not involve field investigators. I suspect there is no such system, and this law will try to create any additional level of surveillance of American citizens. The problem with NICS continues to be incomplete and inaccurate information entered into the system. I am at a loss of what an “enhanced” background check would include that isn’t a restraining order, a felony conviction, or a civil commitment order. Just joking, those “community mental health centers” will feature prominently here. I also don’t know how you make a juvenile record available for “young” buyers without making it available to nearly everyone and why only “young” buyers would be subject to such an “enhanced” background check
7/ What constitutes a “licensed gun dealer” is damned clear. This is aimed at shutting down the private sale or gifting of firearms.
10/ Dude, you are in Congress. Failure is always an option.
This is all eyewash. Besides funds for hardening schools, the whole plan is an exercise in “doing something.” Literally, nothing in this proposed bill would have done any good in any major shooting. It wouldn’t even have an impact on Saturday night in Chicago or LA, which is where the focus should be for anyone serious about ending firearms deaths. I’d done playing this game. As Bonchie and I have pointed out, this is not an end state but a waypoint. This is just the anti-gun left getting Republicans to buy into the concept of silly measures that can’t work so that at some point in the future, the left can say we’ve tried everything, and they know there will be quisling Republicans to help them ban firearms.
Looks like standard operational unspecific jabberjawing to me
After days of negotiations that worried Second Amendment advocates and law-abiding firearm owners due to talk of sweeping new restrictions, it seems like — for now at least — the Republican members of the bipartisan working group held the line on the strictest proposals, though they didn’t stop Democrats on all fronts in the talks that made many conservatives scratch their heads.
The bipartisan group of Senators — led by Chris Murphy (D-CT) and John Cornyn (R-TX) — announced their proposal for legislation they seem to think has a chance of making it through their evenly-divided chamber.
In a joint statement, the senators said their plan will “protect America’s children, keep our schools safe, and reduce the threat of violence across our country” while citing a duty they feel to “come together and get something done.” Never mind, apparently, that all the restrictive gun laws in Chicago and elsewhere haven’t protected residents.
The statement continued saying the agreement “increases needed mental health resources, improves school safety and support for students, and helps ensure dangerous criminals and those who are adjudicated as mentally ill can’t purchase weapons,” again, as if previous laws to keep guns out of criminals’ hands had worked. “We look forward to earning broad, bipartisan support and passing our commonsense proposal into law,” the statement concludes. We’ll see.
The proposal includes providing “resources” — likely grant incentives — to states if they implement so-called “red flag laws.” It also includes investing taxpayer dollars in mental health services for families and in schools along with school safety resources to “to help institute safety measures in and around primary and secondary schools, support school violence prevention efforts and provide training to school personnel and students.” The proposal announcement also says legislators will seek to include an “enhanced review period” for firearm purchasers under 21 years old.
Perhaps notably — and showing Democrats did not get all the things they’ve called for in the wake of the tragedy in Uvalde, Texas — is a lack of their buzzword assault weapons ban, high capacity magazine restrictions, a federal red flag system, or an increase in the minimum age to purchase certain rifles.
To be clear, the lack of those items in the framework proposal does not mean Democrats won’t try to sneak in some version of them as an eventual piece of legislation is developed.
As WaPo previewed before the official announcement of the proposal, the inclusion of billions of federal dollars for school security programs and mental health care is probably the only thing the proposal has going for it with most Republicans.
Townhall reported last week that an armed school resource officer and secured doors kept an aggressive man from entering an elementary school filled with children. The SRO took the individual down with assistance from local law enforcement while most children inside the building were unaware that anything had happened outside. The training and protocol that worked there should be used for a framework, not gun-grabbing Democrats’ CNN talking points.
Throughout the negotiations, Republicans involved had tried to assuage concerns from firearm owners and gun safety advocates. Sen. Cornyn said that the forthcoming deal was “not about creating new restrictions on law-abiding citizens” but “about ensuring that the system we already have in place works as intended.” Yet several of the pieces of the framework seem to include new restrictions, albeit lesser than a blanket ban on “assault weapons” or magazines.
And while the group may have reached a tentative agreement, they’re only a small group of the U.S. Senate — and several Republicans in the crew such as Susan Collins (ME) and Mitt Romney (UT) are not exactly known as standard bearers for the GOP. At least 60 senators in all would be needed to support any resulting legislation in order to overcome a potential legislative filibuster.
As we’ve learned before, a statement of agreement between a small group of senators is anything but a done deal. We’ve also learned that what might seem to be a workable legislative framework can turn into a Frankenstein’s monster of horrible policies as Democrats scheme to use the bipartisan cover of squishy Republicans to ultimately get their way.
The best thing for any Senate Republican to do at this point is walk away from the table and declare opposition over anything even remotely concerning in the tentative agreement — the incentive for red flag laws or the enhanced review for under-21 purchasers, for example — or legislation as it ends up being written.
There’s less than five months until the midterms, Democrats need at least ten Republicans to even move a bill to a vote, and there’s no reason for Republicans to cave on an issue as critical as Americans’ Second Amendment freedoms just to look like they’re playing nice. Democrats would never do the same if they were in the minority, and there are better, more effective, less freedom-depriving options available to respond to tragedies like the one in Uvalde. Harden schools, fund resource officers, train willing staff, and work to remedy the myriad failures of government that are discovered in the wake of such tragedies.
And when they come back into session, they’ll probably conveniently let it die with some bland boilerplate statements.
Senators have wrapped up their work and left Washington, D.C., without reaching a deal on gun violence legislation, disappointing Democrats who had hoped to issue a joint statement with Republicans on a framework.
Democrats say they are “very close” to an agreement with Sen. John Cornyn (Texas), the lead Republican negotiator, but Democratic and Republican staff still need to hammer out differences over language, according to Senate negotiators.
Senate sources say that Sen. Chris Murphy (Conn.), the lead Democratic negotiator, was “itching” to put out a joint statement with Cornyn before lawmakers left town but that Cornyn declined to sign on to any public statement until there’s an agreement on the language of the core proposals.
“There’s not an agreement until we agree on everything,” Cornyn told reporters Thursday afternoon. “We’ve narrowed the issues considerably.”
Cornyn said the group had hoped to release a joint statement by week’s end but isn’t there yet.
“We were hopeful there might be something we could do today, but we have this remaining issue we need to resolve,” he said.
Sources familiar with the negotiations said Cornyn, a former Texas Supreme Court justice, doesn’t want to sign off on any framework until the language of the core provisions are finalized.
“How outrageous is that?” Cornyn quipped about his insistence on knowing the details of the agreement before endorsing a framework for the legislation.
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said he wanted a deal by the end of this week and has come under pressure from progressives to force a Senate vote on gun control legislation if Republicans don’t agree to a compromise bill soon.
Schumer received a briefing from Murphy on Thursday afternoon, telling reporters afterward that the bipartisan group is making good progress and that he hopes to get something from the group soon.
The four core negotiators — Cornyn, Murphy, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) — are scheduled to hold a virtual meeting to continue the talks Friday afternoon.
They are looking for a deal that can bring along 10 Republican votes to overcome a filibuster in the 50-50 Senate. Every Democrat is expected to vote for the legislation.
The Republicans in the negotiating group also include Sens. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.).
If those four plus Cornyn and Tillis agree to vote “yes,” Democrats would still need to round up four more Republicans to overcome the 60-vote threshold for ending a filibuster.
Senior Democrats briefed on the negotiations say the two sides are “very close” to a deal and expect to see an agreement by sometime next week.
“I think we are very close,” said Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.). “We have good vibrations. I think Schumer did the right thing by focusing on a date to complete the negotiations.”
Schumer said soon after a gunman killed 21 people in Uvalde, Texas, that he would give Republicans only a short amount of time to work out compromise legislation before he would begin to force them on gun control proposals.
Republicans want to create tax incentives for the sale of safe storage equipment, while Democrats want to also add mandates for safe storage.
Another tricky issue is how to handle people who make a business of selling firearms online but are not required to conduct background checks because they don’t hold federal firearm licenses. Gun control advocates view this as a loophole in the law requiring firearm dealers to conduct background checks.
Cornyn on Thursday said significant progress has been made since then on classifying people who make a business of selling firearms, noting that he and Murphy have worked on the issue for more than a year.
Another potential landmine in the negotiations is a proposal to encourage states to set up red flag laws to remove firearms from people deemed a danger to the community.
Marshall on Thursday said he doesn’t “see how any red flag [law] passes” and called it a “poison pill.”
“I don’t think the red flags address the real issue,” he said. “I think it could sure be abused. I think it’s an infringement on the Second Amendment.”
Daines said he would oppose using taxpayer money to give states incentives to establish red flag laws.
Nineteen states and the District of Columbia already have such laws on the books.
“What hasn’t been talked about a lot is the school resource officer at Uvalde was not at his post. Why are we not talking more about that? Imagine for a moment if you had a couple of Capitol police officers who weren’t at their post and someone came in the Capitol. There would be a lot of discussion about what do we do to keep the security hardened around the Capitol,” he said.
Blumenthal, who has negotiated a red flag law with Graham, however, said members of the bipartisan group should be able to reach agreement on that issue.
“We’re going to keep working on language. I’m enormously encouraged having worked on this for quite a few years,” he said of red flag legislation.
Murphy, the lead Democratic negotiator, declined to say whether he could support a package that doesn’t include incentives for states to set up red flag laws.
“I’m not drawing any lines in the sand at this point,” he said, though he added a red flag law “could have made a difference in Uvalde.”
If any of the January 6 Commission’s hearings are again scheduled to take place in prime time, it’s entirely possible that the networks will take a “hard pass” next time:
Context: The evening newscasts on CBS, NBC & ABC average anywhere from 18 to 20 million viewers combined on a typical night. Those newscasts do not air in primetime. The January 6 hearings airing in primetime Thursday took in just 11+ million viewers on those three same networks. https://t.co/KcdsM5sx3Z
While the Senate negotiations on a legislative response to the recent mass murders in Buffalo and Uvalde continue, Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy told CNN on Thursday morning that an attempt to ban adults under the age of 21 from purchasing modern sporting rifles is now “off the table” as the two sides work to find something they can present to their colleagues that might win approval from 10 Republican senators.
Murphy, the Democrat leading the negotiations in conjunction with Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, framed the shift as one of the compromises that will be needed to get at least 10 Republican votes, given the obstacle of the filibuster.
The compromise, Murphy explained, would be adding “additional scrutiny” to 18- to 21-year-olds looking to buy a weapon like the AR-15, though he stopped short of specifying that some sort of waiting period would replace raising the age.
“I think we continue to try to find a path to 60 votes that includes some provision that recognizes these 18- to 21-year-olds tend to be the mass shooters, and that many times, they have juvenile criminal records or past histories of mental health that should prohibit them from buying a weapon,” Murphy said, adding he thinks there is some Republican support for raising the age, but not enough to meet the 60-vote threshold to clear the filibuster.
Here’s the thing: Murphy is just flat out wrong about adults under 21 being most likely to commit these types of attacks, as the FBI’s recent report on active shooter incidents in 2021 clearly demonstrates.
Just 16 of the 61 incidents documented by the FBI involved a killer under the age of 24, much less 21. I took a deeper look into the FBI report and found that only five of the 61 incidents last year involved suspects under the age of 21; less than 10% of the overall number of these heinous crimes. And of the five incidents, two involved the use of a rifle, while three involved handguns.
It seems to me that these senators, including Murphy, are looking more at the killers in Buffalo and Uvalde, who were both 18-years of age at the time of their mass murders, than examining the actual statistics, which completely undercut the argument of targeting specific firearms or a particular age.
Meanwhile, you’d think that corporations would have gotten the message that customers want them to focus on their products and services instead of wading into the culture wars by now, but that’s not stopping the heads of hundreds of business from calling on Congress to pass new gun control legislation in the wake of the mass shootings in Buffalo, New York and Uvalde, Texas.
Many of the names on the list of signatories of an open letter to the U.S. Senate, however, are familiar names for Second Amendment advocates, because they’ve been issuing their corporate calls for gun control for several years.
The letter is signed by some of the nation’s largest companies including Bloomberg LP, The Permanente Medical Group, Levi Strauss, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Lyft and the Philadelphia Eagles.
Bloomberg obviously has been in favor of all kinds of new restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms for years, and it’s hard to expect anything less from the company run by the gun control lobby’s biggest sugar daddy. Levi Strauss and Dick’s have also been longtime corporate supporters of gun control measures, while Lyft has imposed its own driver disarmament policy that leaves contractors unable to defend themselves from armed robbers or carjackers without their ability to drive for the company being terminated. If they don’t even want their own contractors to be able to protect themselves in their own vehicles, you can imagine the contempt the company has for the right of average citizens to be able to keep and bear arms in self-defense.
The letter was apparently put together by Levi Strauss and Bloomberg’s pet gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety, and Axios, who was first to report on the missive says that the document is void of any support for specific pieces of gun control legislation under debate, opting instead of boilerplate language urging the Senate to “take urgent action to pass bold gun safety legislation as soon as possible in order to avoid more death and injury.”
In a fascinating twist, while the CEOs of three professional sports teams (the San Francisco 49ers, San Francisco Giants, and Philadelphia Eagles) signed on to the letter, no one from the Tampa Bay Rays organization lent their name to the anti-gun effort, even though the baseball team recently used its social media platforms to advocate for unnamed gun control laws and to back Everytown for Gun Safety’s gun control mission. The Rays absence from the letter might have something to do with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ even more recent veto of a bill that would have spent more than $30-million in state funds on a training facility that would be mostly used by the team, though the governor didn’t directly tie in the veto to Rays’ gun control messaging.
I doubt that the negotiations in the Senate are going to produce anything that these anti-gun CEOs would truly consider “bold”, and I’m glad to hear Murphy say that a gun ban for adults under the age of 21 is apparently no longer a part of the discussions. Still, based on Murphy’s comments it seems the Senate negotiations are still aiming in the wrong direction by focusing on young adults and modern sporting rifles in spite of what the data actually tells us.
Matthew McConaughey is a cut above most political celebrities.
He doesn’t spit fire and brimstone like director Rob Reiner or Alyssa Milano. Nor does he bend the truth until it snaps like a branch, as the “View” hosts do on a regular basis.
The Oscar winner is calm, measured and unwilling to demonize the mainstream Left or Right.
In a way, he’s everything we want in a celebrity sticking his neck out on the issues of the day. Except he just made the biggest mistake of his quasi-political life.
He chose a side. And he chose badly for more than a few reasons.
McConaughey’s recent gun control plea, made via the current White House’s invitation, won’t be easily forgotten. His policy suggestions proved generic and unlikely to move the needle on gun violence.
Then again, why would anyone expect the “Dallas Buyers Club” star to set forth any bold new agendas? He’s an actor, not a gun control expert. He brings a layman’s touch to the subject, meaning there’s little reason for him to even be on such an important political stage.
It’s one thing for a celebrity to share a hot take on Twitter. It’s another to travel to Washington, D.C. and demand said take be given the gravitas of a State of the Union address.
Figures like John Lott and Dana Loesch have been enmeshed in guns for years, if not decades. Agree or disagree with their opinions, they’ve studied the topic aggressively and offer sober insights.
What has McConaughey done to measure up?
More importantly, the star has been carefully straddling the line between Democrats and Republicans in recent years. He’s teased running for Texas governor, inserting himself into various narratives along the way.
And he’s done so without choosing a party. That’s no accident.
Embracing generic gun control platitudes, from the Biden White House pulpit of all places, changed that. And he did it at a moment when Team Biden is on its heels, pounded by terrible polling numbers and facing a Red Wave come November.
It’s not politically smart to back the wrong horse.
Not only did McConaughey pick a political side, but he also did so at the worst possible time. Today’s Democratic party doesn’t resemble the one President Barack Obama commandeered just a few short years ago.
It’s angry, uncompromising and beholden to its far-Left base. And that seems to clash with everything the actor represents.
The modern Left looks the other way when its side commits political violence, or it implicitly eggs it on. It gently nods as protesters descend on the homes of Supreme Court Justices, assuming the legal eagles lean to the Right.
McConaughey’s “new” side often demands abortion up until birth, cheers on Big Tech censorship and champions Cancel Culture.
The actor may not embrace those extreme measures, but his new party does. And how will Democrats take to McConaughey’s kinder, gentler approach? They’ll rage against his willingness to defend Trump voters, as he’s done in the past. They’ll steam over his inability to demonize the other side.
Conservatives offer a bigger tent today, witness Dr. Oz’s primary victory in Pennsylvania. Or, closer to Hollywood, look at how the Right rallies behind left-leaning comics like Ricky Gervais, Joe Rogan and Dave Chappelle.
No one fought harder for Rogan than the Right, and even he admitted as much.
Republicans might have made room for a center-leaning soul who just so happened to be a movie star. Democrats may cheer McConaughey on as he pushes more gun control measures, but every other time he opens his mouth they’ll demand he shut it, and fast.
The political neophyte will learn that lesson soon enough.
House passes huge gun control bill. Now on to the Senate, where none of them are even talking about what the House passed.
The House on Wednesday voted 223-204 to pass a package of gun control bills that were introduced in the wake of the deadly shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas.
Driving the news: The omnibus legislation was dubbed the “Protecting Our Kids Act” and is unlikely to get 60 votes to break a filibuster in the Senate.
The bills would raise the legal purchasing age for semi-automatic rifles from 18 to 21 and ban the import, sale, manufacture, transfer or possession of large-capacity magazines, among other provisions.
It would also establish requirements to regulate the storage of firearms on residential premises and create criminal penalties for violations.
What to watch:With the House action all but certain to fail in the Senate, a bipartisan group of senators is instead focused on crafting a gun control deal that can pass the chamber — even if it means compromising…..
WASHINGTON, D.C.-(Ammoland.com)- One proposed gun control that has support on both sides of the issue is extreme risk protection orders (ERPO), better known as “red flag” laws.
Red flag laws allow a gun owner’s firearms to be stripped from them by police if they are reported to be a danger to themselves or others. In most cases, the gun owner isn’t aware that an ERPO has been taken out until police show up to execute the order. The gun owner then must prove that they are not a danger to anyone to get their property back. They must hire a lawyer at their own expense, meaning that poverty-stricken gun owners are less likely to fight an ERPO.
Many in the firearms community believe that red flag laws not only violate a person’s Second Amendment rights, but it also violates the gun owner’s Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights. Many claim that ERPOs violate the right to due process and flips the burden of proof to the gun owner.
Since this gun control measure is the most likely to pass in Congress, AmmoLand News has decided to look at gun rights advocacy and industry groups’’ opinions on red flag laws. AmmoLand News has reached out to various national groups to gauge where the gun world falls into the red flag debate. It is essential to understand where these groups stand.
MILWAUKEE (AP) — The two frontrunners for the Republican attorney general nomination say they want to expand gun rights for nonviolent felons.
The Wisconsin State Journal reported that former state Rep. Adam Jarchow and Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney both said during a debate in Milwaukee on Tuesday night that gun rights should be restored for people convicted of nonviolent felonies when they re-join society. Jarchow said he’s heard from nonviolent felons who are frustrated they can’t use guns to hunt with their grandchildren.
“Is there a narrow way we can restore Second Amendment rights to folks without giving career criminals guns?” Jarchow said. “Maybe.”
Jarchow also jabbed Toney for charging 10 people with violating Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ stay-at-home orders at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
Tony said he later dropped the charges and his office never convicted anyone or shut down a business or church and attacked Jarchow over his lack of prosecutorial experience.
Karen Mueller, a conservative attorney also running for the GOP nomination, said she wants to investigate baseless claims that hospitals routinely killed patients with COVID-19 vaccines. The vaccines have proven safe.
The primary is Aug. 9. The winner will face incumbent Democrat Josh Kaul in the November general election.
