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
Let's Have a Real Debate on Guns :: 10/19/2017
“Over the years,” wrote the editors of the New York Times, “the gun lobby, claiming to defend the convenience of hunters and other gun owners, has so bullied Washington that . . . sensible proposals seem beyond reach. But as gun mayhem continues to mount, the political roadblock looks less and less rational, more and more deadly.”
These words appeared in 1993.
The fact that they could have appeared in the Times at any time in the last 30 years—indeed they sound a lot like the editorial that ran in the paper in the aftermath of the October 1 Las Vegas massacre—gives you a sense of just how stale and predictable the debate over guns in America has become. The pattern is depressingly familiar: Someone uses a gun in an act of mayhem and murder. Progressive and center-left politicos demand “action” in the form of gun-control legislation. Congress toys with the idea but doesn’t pass much of anything. The Times and other liberal publications and commentators denounce the “gun lobby” to which they attribute vast powers of coercion.
So it happened in the days after Stephen Paddock, firing weapons from a Las Vegas hotel room into a crowd of thousands, murdered 58 people and injured hundreds more. Investigators can find no motive. Mainly what they’ve found are guns—something close to two dozen of them in Paddock’s room, ranging from handguns to semi-automatic rifles, 12 of them effectively converted to fully automatic, what we commonly call machine guns. That led the usual coalition of celebrities and Democratic politicians to blame the carnage on guns—more particularly on the “gun lobby”—and demand that Congress “do something.”
But what can we do about a man with no criminal record who, for reasons known only to God, decides to turn a hotel room into an armory, smash the windows, and murder as many people as he can before turning a gun on himself? What can we do about a young man who determines to murder schoolchildren in their classrooms or about another young man who sits with humble Christians in Bible study before killing them with a handgun? For all the easy sermonizing from gun-control advocates, the question of what laws or regulations might have prevented such manifestations of depravity is not easily answered. There are piecemeal alterations to the law, to be sure, and we have passed many of them over the last five decades.
What about the Las Vegas massacre? The sale of automatic weapons is already tightly regulated by federal law, to the point at which an ordinary person can only get one with dogged determination. Paddock used “bump stocks” to fire his semi-automatic rifles with machine-gun-like rapidity, and Congress should outlaw these devices. But the next shooting will happen regardless of such a ban, for there is no way to ban the rage that will give rise to it. Indeed, as the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler reluctantly conceded after a thorough analysis in 2015, none of the mass shootings perpetrated between 2012 and 2015 would have been prevented by any actual gun-control proposal.
The case for increased gun regulation isn’t helped, either, by the fact that what laws have been passed and rigorously enforced all over the nation have had little or no measurable result. A comprehensive study published in 2013 by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council could find no clear correlation between the implementation of gun-control laws and reductions in gun-related violence.
But what makes the gun debate so unbearably stale isn’t any disagreement over the interpretation of data. Nor is it a dispute over the value of firearms in a free society. If only it were about these questions. What makes the debate so stale, rather, is the disingenuousness of those who claim to want “sensible” and “reasonable” gun regulations but who in fact want an outright ban.
Supporters of stricter gun laws are not stupid. Some are rather prone to moral exhibitionism, for sure—we think of Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who didn’t wait for the blood to dry in Las Vegas before commencing a self-righteous tirade about the “cowardice” of his colleagues on the Hill who disagree with him on gun policy. But Murphy, Hillary Clinton, Piers Morgan—these people are not stupid. They do not actually think that reducing the capacity of magazines on semi-automatic rifles will somehow make it more difficult for deranged men to shoot schoolchildren. They don’t actually believe that closing the “gun show loophole” (the provision in the Brady law of 1998 by which gun purchasers may avoid background checks) will make Americans safer.
Yet gun-control proponents persist in this charade. Why? Because their real aim—an outright ban on all civilian use of handguns and most rifles—would require a repeal of the Second Amendment. They can’t or won’t call for such a repeal because, for all their brandishing of opinion polls and claims to speak for the majority, they stand no chance of accomplishing it. It’s not impossible to repeal an amendment. The Eighteenth Amendment, establishing Prohibition, was repealed by the Twenty-First in 1933. But it’s impossible to repeal a popular amendment, and Americans like guns and value the Second Amendment far too much to consider excising it from the Constitution.
Since they can’t name their desire, anti-gun activists, in a kind of Freudian displacement maneuver, spend their energy fulminating against the “gun lobby.” Hence all those Times editorials about the NRA “bullying” Washington and holding congressional Republicans in thrall. Hence all those talking-head diatribes and crime-show episodes portraying the “gun lobby” as some dark super-mafia, the mere mention of which turns otherwise cocksure politicians into whimpering fools. But do the NRA and related groups really have such great power? You wouldn’t know it from their lobbying expenses. Last year, gun-rights groups spent $10.5 million on lobbying. Environmental-advocacy groups spent $13 million. Labor unions spent $47.2 million. The agricultural services and products sector: $32.7 million.
If the gun lobby seems to have sway in Washington, it is because a lot of ordinary American voters feel strongly about the issue. Sufficiently strongly to vote against a lawmaker who supports what they deem—rightly or wrongly—to be a restriction on gun ownership.
The main obstacle for gun-control advocates is not some mendacious lobby but Americans themselves. We like guns. We like shooting them. We use them to protect our families and our businesses from criminals. We collect guns—as an antiquarian hobby, as preparation for the apocalypse, and just for fun. We like watching movies in which people use them to deadly effect. Europeans and their domestic imitators may not understand our affection for firearms (though they seem to enjoy the gun violence in American movies all the same). But it is a cultural and sociological fact that will not be overcome by incremental restrictions and sanctimonious jeremiads against gun manufacturers and denunciations of the allegedly omnipotent gun lobby.
If progressives insist on engaging in the joyless ritual of arguing about guns after every inscrutable act of mass murder, we would prefer that they drop the pretense and advocate the repeal of the Second Amendment and the confiscation of our guns. We disagree with that view, but we would rather have an honest debate about the Constitution than go on trampling the sensibilities of mourners by treating their grief as an occasion to quarrel about statutory adjustments nobody really believes in.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/lets-have-a-real-debate-on-guns/article/2009949
