PA Bill Number: HB2235

Title: Providing for regulation of the meat packing and food processing industry by creating facility health and safety committees in the workplace; ...

Description: Providing for regulation of the meat packing and food processing industry by creating facility health and safety committees in the workplace; ... ...

Last Action: Referred to LABOR AND INDUSTRY

Last Action Date: Apr 25, 2024

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Gun prohibitionists continue push for background checks :: 06/12/2015

Anti-gun billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety lobbying organization yesterday launched an e-mail effort to push background check expansion while in Oregon yesterday, a fourth recall effort has begun, this time against state Sen. Floyd Prozanski of Eugene, who championed Oregon’s new expanded background check law.

The Everytown appeal asserts that “An overwhelming 92% of Americans support background checks for all gun sales. But under pressure from the Washington gun lobby, Congress has stalled and failed to close the deadly loopholes in the background check system.”

It is not clear where they get that number, but in Washington State last fall, the Everytown-backed Initiative 594 could only garner 59.27 percent of the vote after proponents spent a shattering $10 million to pass it against a far-lower funded effort to stop it. If such support existed, it would seem the gun control lobby would not have had to spend that much money to promote a measure that should have passed automatically. That said, the Everytown letter might have some low information voters believing there are no such checks right now.

“Millions of guns are exchanged each year without a criminal background check — most often between strangers who meet online or at gun shows,” the letter asserts. “Felons, domestic abusers, the seriously mentally ill, and other dangerous people know about this loophole, and they exploit it every day.

What the message doesn’t admit, and anti-gunners never will acknowledge, is that background check laws are routinely ignored by criminals. They get guns through theft, black market purchases or trades (for drugs or other stolen goods).

The deceptive e-mail declares, “It’s time to close this dangerous loophole, and pass laws that will prevent dangerous people from being able to buy guns with no background checks and no questions asked.”

As if “dangerous people” at whom such legislation is aimed are going to care one whit about a new law. Criminals break laws every day. It goes with the job description.

This disconnect stretches to Oregon, where Prozanski, a leading Democrat, championed the effort to pass Senate Bill 941. Critics, including Patricia Michaelson-Duffy, described as a Lane County Republican precinct committee person who filed a recall petition against Prozanski, have argued that this new law will only impact law-abiding gun owners, while not keeping guns out of criminal hands or preventing a single crime.

Whether Prozanski needs to seriously worry about being thrown out of office over his support for gun control will be up to voters in his district. Those same voters re-elected him last fall. But now some of those constituents are angry, and history teaches us that discontent can become insurrection.

MEANWHILE, CBC News in Canada reported yesterday that Don Iveson, mayor of Edmonton, Alberta, issued an apology over a remark that smacked of gun control exploitation. He apparently inserted foot-in-mouth earlier by speculating that the loss of Canada’s long gun registry – a multi-billion political disaster that was trashed by the current government because it didn’t work – might be somehow related to the slaying of a city police officer this week.

Constable Daniel Woodall was killed Monday while trying to serve a warrant. According to the Huffington Post/Canada, Iveson stated, “I do have a concern with gun violence and I will say that the loss of the gun registry may be related to this.” But he “quickly backtracked,” the news agency said. His remark was criticized by federal Justice Minister Peter MacKay as “ill timed” and “absurd.”

But Iveson wasn’t the only politician who apparently tried to exploit the tragedy. The HuffPo also noted that Cabinet Minister Steven Blaney remarked during a Senate committee meeting on a Conservative gun measure that Constable Woodall was “killed in cold blood by a member of a right-wing extremist group.”

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