proposed laws

PA Bill Number: HB777

Title: In firearms and other dangerous articles, further providing for definitions and providing for the offense of sale of firearm or firearm parts without ...

Description: In firearms and other dangerous articles, further providing for definitions and providing for the offense of sale of firearm or firearm parts without ...

Last Action: Third consideration and final passage (104-97)

Last Action Date: Mar 27, 2024

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The new Congress should reject Pelosi's feel-good, accomplish-nothing gun control agenda :: 12/12/2018

In the House of Representatives, at least, the midterm election was indeed a blue wave. And when the new Congress is seated in January, that wave might just wash away your gun rights.

Democratic campaigns were dominated by anti-gun rhetoric, and the party won control of Congress in the wake of tragic shootings in Pittsburgh and Thousand Oaks, so gun control is emerging as one of their top legislative priorities. And, the next Speaker of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, is leading the charge against the Second Amendment.

“The American people deserve real action to end the daily epidemic of gun violence,” Pelosi said a few days after the election, signaling her commitment to gun control legislation. For Pelosi and her cohorts, this means mandating universal background checks and instituting a ban on what they call “assault weapons.” Although these proposals may sound like common sense, the new Congress should recognize them for what they are—empty promises that must be rejected.

Take, for instance, the concept of “universal background checks.” The Democratic proposal that every gun purchase or transfer should require a background check sounds great in theory. And Democrats love to point out that nine in 10 Americans support universal background checks, but that’s not itself a valid argument for the feel-good policy.

The actual facts don’t work out in their favor. The shooter who took 59 lives at a music festival in Las Vegas last year passed multiple background checks. The killer who murdered 29 people in a Texas church in 2017 should have been prevented from buying a gun because of his history, but the background check system failed. And other examples of similar failures abound.

Would-be mass shooters can also easily circumvent a background check by finding someone to purchase a gun for them, or by stealing one of the 400 million firearms in the U.S.

Besides, Democrats ignore the holes in their proposal. For one thing, all licensed dealers are already required to run background checks under federal law—meaning 87 percent of gun sales already have them. The only way to enforce any extension of the practice to all sales would be to require the registration of all guns in a federal database and the surveillance of all exchanges, including those between private citizens. This Orwellian idea runs contrary to the very principle of the Second Amendment: that people must retain some ability to resist government tyranny.

Pelosi’s other popular proposal is to ban “assault weapons,” loosely defined as military-style weapons that are often semi-automatic. On its face, such an idea probably sounds reasonable—but incoming Congressmen shouldn’t be fooled. We’ve tried this before, and it failed. President Bill Clinton signed a ban on assault weapons into law in 1994, and it remained in place until 2004.

Most experts agree that few or no decreases in gun violence occurred as a result of the ban. A Department of Justice study found that “the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best.” The University of Pennsylvania professor who authored the report admitted that he “[could not] clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence.” Even the liberal website Vox.com admits that an assault weapons ban is “one of the gun control measures with the least supportive evidence behind it.”

It’s easy to see why the assault weapons ban was so unsuccessful. For one thing, the number of crimes committed with assault weapons has always been extraordinarily low, making up less than three percent of all gun-related homicides. But beyond that, any ban is easy for a committed criminal to sidestep. Realistically, the millions of assault weapons in America aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. For the rest of our lifetime, at least, it won’t be difficult for a criminal to steal or buy one on the black market—so a ban would really just disarm law-abiding citizens.

Moreover, there are plenty of other weapons that are just as deadly as assault weapons, which are defined rather arbitrarily. For example, such a policy might ban intimidating rifles like the AR-15, but leave equally deadly semi-automatic pistols and easily-modifiable rifles untouched. It’s obvious that bans on assault weapons offer no real solution to gun violence, but no amount of gun control can stop determined killers. After all, a terrorist killed 84 people with a truck in the Paris Attacks of 2016.

That’s why we must call upon the new Congress to reject these Democratic gun control proposals. It would be a mistake to embrace feel-good-but-foolish restrictions on the rights of everyday Americans—just to hand Nancy Pelosi another political win.

Brad Polumbo is an editor at Young Voices. His work has previously appeared in USA Today, National Review, and the Daily Beast. You can find him on Twitter @Brad_Polumbo.

https://www.ocregister.com/2018/12/11/the-new-congress-should-reject-pelosis-feel-good-accomplish-nothing-gun-control-agenda/