One would extend time you have to wait to buy a gun due to a background check…
One would mandate background checks for ALL gun purchases including those on-line and between private persons….
With the two votes?
Democrats have passed gun control legislation for the first time on a federal level in a long time….
What’s next?
Nothing…
There aren’t the votes in the Senate….
And Trump says he’d veto the bills….
House Democrats took a victory lap this week as their new majority passed two priority gun control measures that the previous Republican majority had blocked for years, but they appear to be in no rush to pass more.
“Yes, not immediately, but this session,” Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler told Roll Call on Thursday when asked if his panel would be marking up more legislation designed to prevent gun violence. Not immediately, the New York Democrat said, is likely “after June sometime.”
Nadler’s remarks came after the House on Thursday passed, 228-198, legislation that would extend from three days to 10 days the time for the government to complete a background check on someone who’s trying to buy a gun from a licensed dealer before the sale can go through.
House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn has been introducing the measure to address what’s known as “the Charleston loophole” since the 2015 mass shooting there at a South Carolina church that left nine dead. The gunman, Dylann Roof, was able to purchase a firearm even though his background check had not been approved because the FBI needed more time beyond the legal three-day window.
A day earlier, the House passed a bill that would expand the background check process to include purchases made at gun shows, online or in other private settings, not just at licensed dealers. That vote was 240-190.
California Rep. Mike Thompson, the sponsor of that earlier measure, said the gun violence prevention task force that he chairs will continue to look at other legislative solutions, but he had no immediate timing in mind for advancing more bills.
“A lot of people have a lot of ideas. We’re looking at them all. If good ones are there, we’ll do everything we can to get them to the forefront,” he said…..
….as modest as it is, it will be an uphill climb in the Senate to convince enough Republicans to listen to the outcry from their own constituents over the generations-long rigidity of the National Rifle Association and its unprincipled cheerleader in the White House.
President Trump, the recipient of more than $11 million in NRA money in 2016, has threatened to veto both bills.
The inconvenient fact for those accustomed to doing the NRA’s bidding is that support for universal background checks is, well, virtually universal. A recent Quinnipiac University Pollfound that 97 percent of those surveyed — including gun owners — favor universal background checks. Support for stricter gun laws has increased by 19 points just in the last two years. According to pollsters, it’s at its highest level of support since the poll started focusing on the issue, following the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, in Connecticut in 2012.
How many more mass shootings will it take before Congress realizes that offering up “thoughts and prayers” to those who have lost loved ones isn’t really enough. It wasn’t enough for the students of Parkland, Fla., and it shouldn’t be enough for senators of either party.
The key to that vote is two-fold: Democrats in the Senate will have to be as united as they were in House ; and outside groups will have to marshal their power and their money in the same way the NRA has done for years……