If even this isn't enough to drive you to action, you have no business "leading" anyone.
After all the requisite teary-eyed promises that incidents like the murders at Newtown were, at long last, finally too much to bear, we've now moved firmly into the part of the debate where all the usual suspects tell us that they're just fine bearing it, thank you very much, and we don't care if it happens against next month, or six more times this year, or a hundred more times in the next 20 if the alternatives to allowing such easy access to the weapons of mass murder are (1) a bit of paperwork or (2) good, decent patriots not being able to plan their own mass murder sprees if the government starts to go a direction they're not keen on.
Don't ask me the logic behind that, ask NRA spokesman Wayne LaPierre—and don't worry, you won't have trouble finding him. If you're a Newtown resident, you might even have the NRA calling your house to demand you oppose gun safety reforms, because the NRA is just that classy.
But it's the Senate that's the main battleground, and after apparently dumping other measures like new assault weapons restrictions, we're moving on to the battle against even the most popular of all possible reforms—expanding background checks. Those are supported by nearly 90 percent of the public, which is a damn unheard of thing, but that's still not enough for the nation's most proudly spineless political body to possibly go against the NRA. So now it's a full-out ad and lobbying war, and it's weak-kneed Democrats that are one of the big targets, as you can read below the fold.
Over the weekend, Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York announced that he would spend $12 million on ads pressuring a number of Senators in 13 states to support Obama’s gun reforms. The NRA has vowed to respond on the air, meaning the battle over guns will intensify in the states as Congress remains on recess for the next two weeks.
Bloomberg’s ads — which focus largely on the proposal to expand background checks — will target a number of GOP Senators. But the more interesting dimension to this is that they will also target red state Dems: Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Mary Landrieu of Lousiana, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota.
I really can't emphasize enough how repugnant it is that, even in the immediate wake of the Newtown slaughter of elementary school children (coming on the heels of a long line of other recent mass shootings, and not mentioning at all the
thousands of other accidents and murders that go all but unremarked upon, save Kagro's #Gunfail chronicles and similar efforts), our fine and glorious legislative nitwits
still cannot quite muster up the courage to do any damn thing about it. And since there's a limit to how much swearing can fit in a single post, I'm not even going to try. But yes, it may all boil down to whether a handful of red-state Democrats can stomach a gun safety proposal that is supported by
nearly the entire American population aside from those personally employed by the National Rifle Association.
Greg Sargent notes that spokespersons for two of those senators, Joe Donnelly and Heidi Heitcamp, have responded to his questions by saying they are "open" to a compromise on the issue, while others are more sketchy. As Greg says:
Any red state Dems who are reluctant to back this proposal are likely only worried about pressure from the NRA. As it happens, a CBS poll found that 85 percent of people living in NRA households support expanded background checks — putting them at odds with the NRA’s leadership.
This really is a no-brainer. It shouldn't even be an issue, but the House and Senate are so thoroughly captured, with an obsessive fealty to a narrow, narrow set of money-driven interests, that even the most popular and sensible of all ideas can't make it through, so frightened legislators are having to face NRA money or other pro-easy-children-shooting money when the next election comes up. Fine, then: It'll be a test of political courage. Are these supposed leaders willing to do what the vast, near-universal majority of the country agrees needs to be done in the wake of Newtown, or is even
that too much for them to contemplate?
Call or email your senators to demand they pass President Obama's gun safety proposals—including the expansion of background checks.