Archive for the 'Gun Control' Category

Via WRSA, John Robb has written an interesting entry on the social network war on guns.

When it comes to politics, it should be of no surprise to anyone that we’re in uncharted, nonlinear territory now.

Weaponized social networks have seized control of the political process from the traditional political parties and their media gatekeepers.  They are in charge now and, more importantly, they are rapidly evolving.  Getting more powerful with each passing day.

Here’s a good example of how that evolution could could quickly (nearly overnight) go non-linear and plunge us into civil turmoil.

One of the weaponized social networks I’m currently covering is a loosely connected network built on a newly emergent consensus morality (#metoo, etc.).  A consensus that it uses to successfully wield social, and increasingly, political power.

This moral network recently expanded with the addition of the #neveragain movement, after the Parkland shootings.  In the past, a movement like #neveragain would be focused on gun control through changes in government legislation.  Now that it’s part of this weaponized moral network, that focus is going to change.

Why?  This weaponized network isn’t interested in just changing legislation.  It’s far more ambitious than that.  It wants to change everyone‘s behavior and it is building the means to do it.

I think in the main, John is right in his assessment.  Usually in more formal philosophical circles, morality is considered personal behavior, and of the formal divisions of philosophy – metaphysics, ontology, epistemology and ethics – the last category of ethics is considered politics.  It pertains more to public behavior and punishment for failure to meet standards.

What this network is doing is combining the two, morality and ethics.  They are coupling both legal pressure and expectations for personal behavioral.  Because the Christian church in America is so weak and won’t teach its congregants about self defense, tyranny and the like, and because America has lost its cultural foundations, their efforts (the anti-gun social networks) are largely being successful.

Consider.

A number of stores have now decided to stop selling AR-15s or ammunition, and did you know that this includes military PXs?

The sign says, “Ammo clips, magazines and accessories policy update: The Exchange and MCX will no longer sell magazines and clips with a capacity of 11 rounds or higher. These items are no longer available in store or online at shopmyexchange.com; this includes marketplace vendors such as Sportsman’s Guide and the RSR website.”

Kroger has decided even to stop its sales of magazines that discuss certain kinds of weapons, including AR-15s.  The children have yawped and yammered, and people are listening.  In fact, as if totally unexpected, republicans in tight races are now embracing gun control.

There is a problem with all of this.  The social networks don’t have the guns – gun owners have the guns, and aren’t willing to give them up.  This all sets America up for a head-on collision in the coming months and years.  Unless the social networks and politicians back down, there will be blood spilled over this, and it has little to do with guns.  It all has to do with control.

Suffice it to say that Sebastian’s take on this – “Gun owners all need to “come out of the closet” and make it clear we are normal people. We do not have blood on our hands from the school shootings” – won’t do anything to placate the controllers because clarity and correction isn’t what they’re after.  Actually, this is Joe Huffman’s take on it that Sebastian cites, but Joe is as confused as Sebastian if he thinks that demanding that the controllers ignore us will do anything but show weakness and encourage more of the same.

On the legal end of things, how would you like to pay an excise tax of 50% on ammunition?

David Codrea:

If there is “clear, convincing, admissible evidence” that a supposedly “restrained” party is a danger, how is it responsible to allow such a menace access to the rest of us until such time as it can be established that he is no longer a threat? Does anyone think he couldn’t kill with something else? Or, noting routine headlines from places like Chicago and Baltimore, that he couldn’t get a gun? Why wouldn’t he be separated from society, after being afforded real “due process,” with all appropriate protections of course?

Hey, it’s what Trump wants.  It’s what the NRA wants.  It’s what the progressives want.  Cradle to grave security courtesy of the department of pre-crime. Hmm … I was wondering if he’s now prohibited from buying fertilizer at Lowe’s, Home Depot and Tractor Supply?

Scientific American:

Since the 2008 election of President Obama, the number of firearms manufactured in the U.S. has tripled, while imports have doubled. This doesn’t mean more households have guns than ever before—that percentage has stayed fairly steady for decades. Rather, more guns are being stockpiled by a small number of individuals. Three percent of the population now owns half of the country’s firearms, says a recent, definitive study from the Injury Control Research Center at Harvard University.

So, who is buying all these guns—and why?

The short, broad-brush answer to the first part of that question is this: men, who on average possess almost twice the number of guns female owners do. But not all men. Some groups of men are much more avid gun consumers than others. The American citizen most likely to own a gun is a white male—but not just any white guy. According to a growing number of scientific studies, the kind of man who stockpiles weapons or applies for a concealed-carry license meets a very specific profile.

These are men who are anxious about their ability to protect their families, insecure about their place in the job market, and beset by racial fears. They tend to be less educated. For the most part, they don’t appear to be religious—and, suggests one study, faith seems to reduce their attachment to guns. In fact, stockpiling guns seems to be a symptom of a much deeper crisis in meaning and purpose in their lives. Taken together, these studies describe a population that is struggling to find a new story—one in which they are once again the heroes.

Ooo … a “definitive study!”  That makes it sound oh so scientific and all.  Seriously, do these pinheads think people are going to be honest with them or anyone else on whether they have guns and how many they have?  Really?

And did they think to ascribe this alleged result to the notion that the second amendment is there for amelioration of tyranny rather than wanting to be John Wayne?  God, these people must live in a movie.

Funny, this.  I would have thought Scientific American would focus on STEM, like calculus, trajectory, failure modes and effects, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and Monte Carlo analysis.  Does anyone at Scientific American still know how to do calculus?  Can anyone there solve an integral equation?

Nope, they want to cite definitive studies done at … [ahem] … Harvard.  They want to study white men, or maybe white male privilege, or maybe male patriarchy, or male confusion, or something.

My how things have devolved with time.  I’m not a Darwinist and don’t believe in macro-evolution, but if I was, I’d be hard pressed to explain things like this.

Dear Marty,

I see that you weighed in with support for the “fix-NICS” bill.  I was sad to see this, so I wrote you a note that went something like this (in abbreviated form).

Sir,

I feel that this will be a huge mistake and I wish there was a way to undo this.  Unfortunately, there isn’t.  My readers have already sent me this information, and I was wondering if there was anything I could say to them about this?

I haven’t received a reply from you Marty, but I assume you’ve been busy, sir.  I also assume you’ve heard an earful about this, because you’ve withdrawn your support.

Very well.  I’m a forgiving sort of person and it’s the same position I took on Rock River Arms when they flirted with gun control in their own state, intentionally or not.  I’ve made many mistakes in my life, and my aim is to learn from them all and become a better person.

But this episode requires a little bit of unpacking.  You clearly demonstrated bad judgment in the initial endorsement of this bill.  I know that you are a Christian and a defender of the gospel of Jesus Christ.  This means a lot to me, and more than anything else will earn my trust and patronage.  This is also why I recently purchased a CMMG gun – they are a Christian company too.

As a Christian, you must be wiser and more circumspect than those around you.  You cannot be thrown about by the shifting tides and the changing winds.  You must understand that the results of the fall in Adam and his federal headship over all mankind causes sin, and sin causes the very things that the progressives use to foist their schemes of control over others.

You must understand that firearms were ubiquitous in early schools, so much so that gun clubs were a thing.  The changes wrought by society are entirely due to rejection of the very gospel that you claim to support.  And no rejection of the gospel can be repaired or ameliorated by a law or new scheme of control.

Gun control is evil in all of its forms.  It was Dr. Greg Bahnsen who pointed out the utter wickedness of gun control schemes.

The Bible does contain a few direct references to weapons control. There were many times throughout Israel’s history that it rebelled against God (in fact, it happened all the time). To mock His people back into submission to His Law, the Lord would often use wicked neighbors to punish Israel’s rebellion. Most notable were the Philistines and the Babylonians. 1 Samuel 13:19-22 relates the story: “Not a blacksmith could be found in the whole land of Israel, because the Philistines had said, “Otherwise the Hebrews will make swords or spears!” So all Israel went down to the Philistines to have their plowshares, mattocks, axes, and sickles sharpened…So on the day of battle not a soldier with Saul and Jonathan had a sword or spear in this hand; only Saul and his son Jonathan had them.” Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon also removed all of the craftsmen from Israel during the Babylonian captivity (2 Kings 24:14). Both of these administrations were considered exceedingly wicked including their acts of weapons control.

Furthermore, you must understand that the progressives are incrementalists and have been at this a very long time.  They are patient in achieving their goals.  Here is a perfect example.

The only way we can truly be safe and prevent further gun violence is to ban civilian ownership of all guns. That means everything. No pistols, no revolvers, no semiautomatic or automatic rifles. No bolt action. No breaking actions or falling blocks. Nothing. This is the only thing that we can possibly do to keep our children safe from both mass murder and common street violence.

Unfortunately, right now we can’t. The political will is there, but the institutions are not. Honestly, this is a good thing. If we passed a law tomorrow banning all firearms, we would have massive noncompliance. What we need to do is establish the regulatory and informational institutions first. This is how we do it.  The very first thing we need is national registry. We need to know where the guns are, and who has them.

This is why a registry is the Holy Grail for the progressive.  They won’t stop with their initial victories.  Oh no.  In fact, they’ve told you so.  As for this so called “fix-NICS” bill, you must understand what while you might intend something like that for good, the state will never work it that way.

Any increase in the registry of people who cannot own guns will sweep into its chasm veterans who were diagnosed with PTSD, didn’t know they were on a prohibited list (because Obama’s VA reported them as prohibited), try to buy a gun, and then find out they have committed a felony and end up being arrested under this new bill.

Any increase in the registry will sweep into its chasm men and women who someone wanted to be on the list and [falsely] reported them as mentally defective, with the village witch doctors – or psychiatrists – employed by the state now an integral part of the process.

All of that bypasses the right of due process.  One of my readers observed this about court appointed mental health professionals.

Control freaks love psychiatry, a means of social control with no Due Process protections. It is a system of personal opinion masquerading as science. See, e.g., Boston University Psychology Professor Margaret Hagan’s book, Whores of the Court, to see how arbitrary psychiatric illnesses are. Peter Breggin, Fred Baughman and Thomas Szasz wrote extensively about abuses of psychiatry. Liberals blame guns for violence. Conservatives blame mental illness. Neither have any causal connection to violence. The issue is criminal conduct, crime. Suggesting that persons with legal disabilities are criminals shows the nonsensical argument of this politician and his fellow control freaks. Shame on them.

And just today, another astute reader made this observation.

Just as a gun registry is a precursor to gun confiscation, a mental illness registry is a precursor to the “confiscation” of the mentally ill.

The denial of second amendment rights for a certain category of people is a precedent for the denial of any and all other rights held by people in that category.

All men have certain inalienable rights. U.S. citizens have those rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.

Denial or abridgement of those rights for any portion of the population, absent act or crime by each individual, is premised on a determination of one or the other of two things: 1) No human or citizen has any rights that may not be abridged or denied by government at will; or, 2) A certain segment of the population may be deemed to be neither citizens, nor fully human.

Our founders correctly believed that it’s never a good idea to give the state more power, or to centralize what power does exist in the state.  If America is suffering from a lapse in moral constitution, it has nothing to do with the laws or lack thereof.  As a Christian, you know the corrective for that problem.

Again, you must be wiser than your opponents, if indeed the controllers are your opponents.  Even the so-called National Association of Evangelicals, which is anything but national or evangelical, has flirted with gun control because they want to be cool, hip, modern and progressive.  You need to be better and smarter than that.

When the teachers of religion go their own way, you need to remember the Bible.  When the state sings its siren song of more peace for more power, you need to remember that, as Dr. Bahnsen pointed out, all gun control is based in wickedness, and the state is always lying to you.

Please, please, please do not ever let this happen again.  It will take time and hard work to rebuild trust with the gun community.  Please invest the time and work to do just that.

TMZ:

The host of “America’s Most Wanted,” who also helped create a national registry for sex offenders, says the same system is needed for mentally ill people looking to buy guns.

We got John Walsh Saturday at LAX and asked what he made of Florida’s new gun law — in which the age limit to purchase guns was raised to 21 … and teachers can now be armed.

He says it’s a step in the right direction, but also thinks arming teachers is the wrong way to protect schools from potential shooters — he wants trained pros on the ground instead.

Here’s the most interesting tidbit … John apparently believes a national registry logging people with serious mental illness needs to be implemented for would-be gun owners.

I don’t watch television so I don’t see him on TV.  But you see where this is going, right?  The progs want a registry of everyone with notes about what the village witch doctor thinks about him.  We’ve seen this advocated before.

If you think the second amendment is all about amelioration of tyranny, then maybe you will be on that list too.  After all, who decides what mental illness is and who suffers from it?  Remember what commenter Menckenlite observed concerning guns and mental health?

Control freaks love psychiatry, a means of social control with no Due Process protections. It is a system of personal opinion masquerading as science. See, e.g., Boston University Psychology Professor Margaret Hagan’s book, Whores of the Court, to see how arbitrary psychiatric illnesses are. Peter Breggin, Fred Baughman and Thomas Szasz wrote extensively about abuses of psychiatry. Liberals blame guns for violence. Conservatives blame mental illness. Neither have any causal connection to violence. The issue is criminal conduct, crime. Suggesting that persons with legal disabilities are criminals shows the nonsensical argument of this politician and his fellow control freaks. Shame on them.

Never forget that such a system bypasses due process.  That’s why the progressives love it.

Newsweek:

The Trump administration took its first steps to ban bump stocks on guns through regulatory action Saturday morning.

The Department of Justice submitted notice of proposed regulation to clarify the meaning of “machinegun” in the National Firearms Act and Gun Control Act includes bump stock devices, and that federal law, therefore, prohibits their possession, sale, or manufacture.

“President Trump is absolutely committed to ensuring the safety and security of every American and he has directed us to propose a regulation addressing bump stocks,” said Attorney General Jeff Sessions in a statement.

Well I guess it does matter after all what Trump thinks about gun rights, and I guess he isn’t exactly the man he made himself out to be, is he?

Also noteworthy is that Trump praised Florida’s new gun control law, including the banning of bump stocks and the prohibition against persons under 21 from purchasing guns.

Yes, I know.  Trump is better than Hillary.  No, Trump isn’t pro-gun.  Yes, Trump is who he made himself out to be.  He never intimated that he was a strong second amendment supporter, at least as we understand the second amendment.  His words were always limited to concealed carry and how it could help with crime.  His son was always a Fudd, concerned more about hunters.

It’s the way it is folks.  Trump gave us a little more time.  He isn’t playing 3-D chess.

The Texas Tribune:

U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, has enough support to pass his “Fix NICS” gun control bill without the possibility of a filibuster, his office said Friday morning.

It’s not yet clear when the bill might get a vote, but a staff member said there are now 62 sponsors of the bill — a significant milestone. The bill would hold government agencies accountable for failing to properly document individuals’ criminal histories in the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System.

Cornyn and U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., first launched that bill in November after the Sutherland Springs shooting that killed more than two dozen people. But it has stalled in the Senate since then, despite having dozens of senators sign on as co-sponsors recent weeks.

The bill has bipartisan support, though Texas’ other U.S. senator, Republican Ted Cruz, is not among the co-sponsors.

We could go into detail on what this bill does and doesn’t do, but I think there are dangers lurking in this bill.  I also want to make clear that my objection to it is that the entire concept of the NICS is an unconstitutional infringement.

Normally I don’t like to lift prose out of articles at length because I like to send traffic to the original post.  That’s not necessarily true here.  I don’t give a crap about The Weekly Standard for more than a few reasons, not the least of which is that they are gun controllers.  Why else would you publish gun control advocacy like this wrapped in the patriotic blanket of state’s rights?

Nino would not approve.

The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia never intended for guns to end up in schools—and he said so 10 years ago. When he wrote the landmark District of Columbia v. Heller decision, Scalia declared that the “right to keep and bear arms” was an individual right. It was a watershed moment for gun rights advocates. Scalia, ever the careful textualist, was quite specific and forceful in his 2008 decision. And while he may not have imagined a president pushing for armed classrooms, his words are prescient a decade later.

In the years leading up to the Heller decision, gun regulations had varied dramatically: a handgun legally purchased in Arizona might get you a felony conviction in the nation’s capital. Enter Dick Anthony Heller. As a licensed special police officer for the District of Columbia, Heller could carry a gun while on duty, but not while at home. The D.C. handgun ban became the central issue in his lawsuit. In the end, Scalia and four fellow conservative justices agreed: the ban was unconstitutional, and the Second Amendment was an individual right.

That’s probably what most people know about Heller. You can keep your handguns. Neither the District of Columbia, nor other cities, can take away what is a natural right. But most people probably haven’t read Heller (and who could blame them, it’s 157 pages long). If you did read the decision, you might remember that Scalia and the majority specifically staked out what limitations on guns are still in place. (For instance, machine guns are off limits.)

But Scalia also talks about schools in the decision:

. . . nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings . . .

This unambiguous statement is even repeated in the syllabus of the decision. It’s clear Scalia wasn’t pushing to turn America into a gun bazaar—especially if the guns were near schoolchildren, felons, and “sickos” (as President Trump likes to say).

Some states do have armed teachers. Trump made sure to highlight that point when he called on the governors of Texas and Arkansas during a recent televised event. But here again, the court has an answer. Scalia makes it clear in Heller that much of gun regulation is a federalist issue: “States, we said, were free to restrict or protect the right under their police powers.”

So, if Gov. Greg Abbott wants to have armed schools in Texas but Gov. Jerry Brown prefers California’s restrictive guns laws, well, fine. If the state law doesn’t violate the Constitution, then it’s not an issue for Washington. It’s not clear that Trump was thinking about such federalist nuance when he declared “Gun free zones are dangerous. The bad guys love gun-free zones.”

When I first wrote about guns in schools last month I was primarily concerned with the unintended consequences of placing half a million guns close to hormonally-challenged teenagers. Today, I’m also worried about a president who seems to view America as more of a personal fiefdom than as a collection of states with different peoples, traditions, and priorities. What’s good for San Francisco is not always good for San Antonio.

Defense of the image of God in man is always good, regardless of where it is or who does it.  The fact that The Weekly Standard published this pabulum speaks volumes on just what kind of people run the place.

I always said that Heller was weak, as was McDonald, and I can go back in time and find numerous examples of said dislike for the Heller decision.  But the constitution is a covenant whose rights are applied to all people in every nook and cranny of America all of the time.  It’s not by mistake that the progressives see rights as limited, but constitutional allowances for wars of choice, federal taxation, the CIA, the FBI, the DHS, the EPA, and on and on the list could go, from the department of education to SWAT teams and the war on drugs, to federally controlled and mandated health care, to subsidized housing and redistribution of wealth, and federal ownership of land.

The powers of the federal government (except to enforce the guaranteed right of RKBA) are unlimited, but your rights don’t even rate enough for any one to care if a state wants to violate them.

Or in other words, The Weekly Standard, like all progressives, has it ass backwards.

The Verge:

In the days after the Parkland shooting, users flocked to Wikipedia to learn about guns. When users searched for “AR-15” — the style of gun used during the shooting — they were directed to the page for the “Colt AR-15.” The page was viewed more than 200,000 times on the day after Parkland, a hundred times its usual traffic. But those users didn’t find much information about mass shootings or political efforts. In fact, the Colt AR-15 page made no mention of gun control at all, instead spending over a thousand words describing the technical details of the gun’s various parts.

That focus on hardware was by design. For months, the “Colt AR-15” page has been largely edited by a group of gun enthusiast editors. They joined together under the name “Wikipedia Project: Firearms,” or “WP:Firearms” for short. Expertise groups are common on Wikipedia, and in some ways, WP:Firearms fits the mold perfectly: a collection of users with detailed knowledge of a specific topic, keeping a close eye on all the pages where that knowledge might be relevant. But on Wikipedia, as in the real world, the users with the deepest technical knowledge of firearms are also the most fervent gun owners and the most hostile to gun control. For critics, that’s led to a persistent pro-gun bias on the web’s leading source of neutral information at a time when the gun control debate is more heated than ever.

Much of the alleged bias comes from how the articles are structured. For months before Parkland, information on generic AR-15 models was relegated to the Modern Sporting Rifles entry, which detailed various models and after-market additions, but made no mention of mass shootings or other gun control efforts. When some editors tried to include those topics, the backlash from WP:Firearms was immediate.

“Mass-shootings already have their own articles, all relevant info is, or should be, in that page and not needlessly duplicated on other articles,” one editor wrote. “If we start adding info about just one shooting incident to one tenuously-connected article, we’ll be opening a literal Pandora’s box (figuratively speaking).”

Fighting a similarly proposed edit on the Smith & Wesson page, user Trekphiler went further. “There are millions of weapons in civilian hands, including thousands of AR-15s,” he wrote, “and none of them have harmed anyone. This is the usual gun confiscator garbage.”

When users tried to detail the gun control concerns in the Colt AR-15 page, where most “AR-15” searches were still being directed, they ran into another technicality. “Sorry, this is an article about Colt’s AR-15 ™ rifle,” one WP:Firearms editor responded. “This is not the correct article for information that is about AR-15’s in general. That section of the article should be edited to remove the references to crimes that were not committed with Colt AR-15 rifles.”

The fight over gun nomenclature goes far beyond Wikipedia. Gun enthusiasts see terms like “assault weapon” as imprecise, while concrete terms like “semi-automatic” are overly broad. Even the term “AR-15” is difficult to pin down: what was a once-specific trademark has metastasized into a trans-corporate branding tool. “Modern sporting rifle,” the term preferred by WP:Firearms, is seen by many as a public relations gambit by the gun industry to downplay how deadly the weapons really are. There’s no perfect term, but as long as the two sides are fighting over nomenclature, any proposed measures will get lost in a maze of conflicting terms. And on crowdsourced and managed Wikipedia, that means heated, arcane, and tautological debates, often driven by political and cultural biases.

The title of The Verge article is “How gun buffs took over Wikipedia’s AR-15 page.”  Adam Weinstein also bitches about the throw-down he is witnessing over guns.

The phenomenon isn’t new, but in the weeks since the tragic shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., a lot of gun-skeptical liberals are getting a taste of it for the first time: While debating the merits of various gun control proposals, Second Amendment enthusiasts often diminish, or outright dismiss their views if they use imprecise firearms terminology. Perhaps someone tweets about “assault-style” weapons, only to be told that there’s no such thing. Maybe they’re reprimanded that an AR-15 is neither an assault rifle nor “high-powered.” Or they say something about “machine guns” when they really mean semiautomatic rifles. Or they get sucked into an hours-long Facebook exchange over the difference between the terms clip and magazine.

Has this happened to you? If so, you’ve been gunsplained: harangued with the pedantry of the more-credible-than-thou firearms owner, admonished that your inferior knowledge of guns and their nomenclature puts an asterisk next to your opinion on gun control.

It can feel infuriating, being forced to sweat the finest taxonomic distinctions between our nation’s unlimited variety of lethal weapons. I know this feeling acutely, having covered gun violence critically for the better part of a decade and having just buried an old mentor, killed in the Parkland massacre.

“Gunsplained and harangued.”  Ooo … if you think this is tough, just wait until you try to take them from us.  That’ll really be the bitchin’ day!

Just go cry me a river boys.  Grow a set, and stop griping over the fight you asked for on guns.  Uh oh, here comes a flock of wah wah’s.

PJM:

A bipartisan group of senators today unveiled legislation requiring federal authorities to notify state law enforcement officials when a person barred from purchasing a gun attempts to do so.

The NICS Denial Notification Act was introduced by Sens. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), Chris Coons (D-Del.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), and co-sponsored by Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas), Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.). The senators argue that those who fail the background check and violate the law when trying to get a gun — such as convicted felons and domestic abusers — are rarely prosecuted.

Only 13 states currently run their own background checks using the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System system. The rest, including the District of Columbia, rely on the FBI to screen gun buyers, meaning they have to rely on federal reporting to know when someone prohibited from gun ownership pulls a “lie and try.”

Under the new legislation, the FBI would have 24 hours to notify state authorities. Coons calls the bill “one modest, commonsense way” for senators to work across the aisle on gun legislation.

“We can make progress on gun safety while respecting the Second Amendment rights of American citizens, including better enforcing existing gun laws and responding to warning signs that we get of criminal behavior,: said Toomey. “This bipartisan bill is a critical step forward in helping to ensure that our communities can be safe from criminals.”

The legislation comes with the endorsements of the Fraternal Order of Police, Major Cities Chiefs Police Association, Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, National District Attorneys Association, National Domestic Violence Hotline, National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, and Everytown for Gun Safety.

Everytown likes it, and that’s all you need to know.  So are your surprised to see Graham, Toomey, Cornyn and Rubio on this list of quislings?  No, I’m not either.

So let’s make sure you’ve got this straight.  Let’s say that a former Soldier or Marine serves his country with honor, and comes home only to be diagnosed with PTSD, like most of them who saw combat and earned a Combat Action Ribbon (CAR, so-called in the USMC), with reporting done to the NICS.  Many if not most warriors who suffer PTSD recover, and they weren’t a danger to anyone anyway.

Let’s also say that they didn’t know that it is the policy of the VA that warriors with PTSD are reported to the NICS.  Let’s also say that said warrior tries to go buy a gun at his local gun shop, only to find out that unbeknownst to him, he is on a prohibited list.

He’s now a felon just for not knowing, and not only that, he will have to fill out any future form 4473s saying that he was once prohibited by the NICS from purchasing a firearm.

That’s what these quislings want to do.  Just so you know.