Of course, the progs are celebrating this.
After National Rifle Association exectuive vice president Wayne LaPierre insisted during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on gun violence Wednesday that universal background checks on firearms purchases would be ineffective in stopping criminals, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) sharply admonished the pro-gun lobby chief.
“My problem with background checks is you are never going to get criminals to go through universal background checks. And all the law-abiding people, you’ll create an enormous federal bureaucracy, unfunded, hitting all the little people in the country, will have to go through it, pay the fees, pay the taxes,” LaPierre said. “We don’t even prosecute anybody right now that goes through the system we have. So, we’re going to make all those law-abiding people go through the system and then we aren’t going to prosecute any of the bad guys if they do catch one. None of it makes any sense in the real world. We have 80,000 police families in the NRA. We care about safety. We support what works.”
Durbin’s response:
“Mr. LaPierre, that’s the point,” Durbin fired back. “The criminals won’t go to purchase the guns because there’ll be a background check. We’ll stop them from original purchase. You missed that point completely. It’s basic.”
There you have it, the senior Senator from the state that is home to the city that has both some of the most onerous gun laws in America and the highest gun homicide rate claiming that criminals will be discouraged from purchasing guns because of laws. And being condescending about it.
If, perhaps, the “Chicago conversation” about laws and gun crime were happening anywhere except among pro-gun people, Durbin’s response would be roundly ridiculed. Unfortunately, the anti-gun types are adept at highly compartmentalizing facts about such things and file away Chicago’s stats under “Never To Be Discussed”.
Golly, we’ve stopping criminals from buying guns by having a background check! (Um, dude, they steal ‘em or buy ‘em from other criminals.)
@Anonymous: The guns all start out legit. Pinch the abused legit sources and the supply will start to dry up. Of course, your longtime insistence on Loose Guns Policy means “the criminals” have a big current supply to work with, so it will take some time, but when has that been an excuse for not doing the right thing? I’m sure your paranoid conservative mind imagines Homo Criminalus as a separate species with a totally separate world and economy and firearms manufacturing system than you upstanding Homo Patriotus. But really, their guns come from the same stores yours do. As to the original post, way to ignore that the guns in Chicago also have to come from somewhere else, *all*of them not represented by Durbin, and currently not subject to stringent checks. You both missed the point completely.
The guns get stolen, or bought by a legitimiate buyer who sells on the black market.
If you don’t think black markets exist, how do you think our President got his weed and coke?
Different “Anonymous”, btw.
This is all a classic “liberty of the many versus effective police work” type of thing. We could catch much illegal activity with random searches of homes, no probable cause needed. We don’t do that.
It seems to me that people who are aghast at the idea of showing a simple driver’s license at the polling booth but demand background checks are people who value things only when it meets their personal emotional preferences, not because it is logical.
There is a tradeoff here in the discussion. It is not unreasonable for there to be pushback, and for the issue to be discussed, and if the argument goes agaist, for either LaPierre to lose, or the sainted infallible Durbin to lose, hard as that might be for some to fathom.
I actually am becoming increasingly firm in my desire not to live in blue areas–counties, states, nations–because of the self-righteousness from Progressives I do not feel justifiable. Especially as I can all too often find them on both sides of the same principle, when it is to their tactical favtional advantage to do so, not the fabled “nuance” causing it.
The purchase and possession of marihuana and cocaine have been prohibited for almost a century. By your logic the supply should have dried up long ago.
90% of ALL the gun crimes are committed by urban gangbangers.
WHERE IS THE FEDERAL PROGRAM TO DISARM THEM?
Hell, where is the DISCUSSION about disarming them?
It is nowhere to be found and will never be found. “It’s a police matter”.
Let’s be frank. Leftist, small c communists…also now known as the Democratic Party see murder and mayhem by terrorists (home grown and foreign) as a “police matter”…and all other freedoms as a matter for the “police state”.
When a terrorist wants to mass murder our citizens in the name of his Islamanania…he’s a revolutionary of a sort, attacking the very colonialist empire that is so despised and reviled by the small c communists now in power. Their sympathies lie with the perps, not the victims. The victims “deserve it” and “well, you know…they kinda had it coming”.
When urban gang slime terrorize large slices of major metropolitan areas…”well, they are poor, put upon, disaffected youth, who only need to be cut some slack and given love and understanding.” And, apparently…a little government help in getting guns across the border.
But, an armed citizenry that is law abiding and also doesn’t particularly like small c communism, DOESN’T commit crimes of violence, but stands ready to fend off tyranny…well THAT’S a problem that needs “correcting”.
First they take our right to purchase goods and services with free will, then they take our right to bear arms, then they gut our military, and then they turn the media into a state run propaganda farm.
And, still we slumber.
Is it the incremental “evolution” that fools people still? Are there still those so ignorant and blind that they say that this is all just “liberals” with “good intentions”?
If I wanted to start a revolution and I wanted to mask it, I couldn’t have mapped out a better game plan than the one being executed on the American people at this very moment.
“Mr. LaPierre, that’s the point,” Durbin fired back. “The criminals won’t go to purchase the guns because there’ll be a background check. We’ll stop them from original purchase. You missed that point completely. It’s basic.”
Durbin is full of **** and he knows it. He is talking to the stoopidz. It has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with disarming the peasantry.
And yet, this morning in the WaPo there is one “news” piece, one analysis and one op-ed, all trumpeting how Durbin shamed and owned LaPierre. If evolution is right, and the smarts ultimately do get to gnaw the flesh off the skulls of the stupids, then we will surely prevail over this pack of self-deluded fools. The future is ours.
Wow. There’s a reason he’s known as “Dick”.
What a dunce. His repeated election to the Senate says a lot about his constituancy. I bet most of them are on some sort of government subsistence.
The same Senatorial scumbag nce made reference to gulags when discussing the U.S. military.
I wouldn’t let this maggot open his mouth without reminding of it either, and neither would I pass up the opportunity to mock flaccid ‘Dick’ about the murder rate in Chicago and their handgun laws.
Why LaPierre missed the opportunity to humiliate this stooge is beyond me. It’s time we started treating these goons on high to a little taste of our arrogance and our disdain for their ilk.
I pray I’m important enough to get called up to Capitol Hill one day. I will sass those miserable bastards until they drag me out of the court in handcuffs. And I’ll guarantee you Americans will stand up and cheer at their TVs when I do it.