The Bitter, Pathetic Irony Of Dick Durbin Telling Wayne LaPierre He Missed The Point

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”.