Much ado about Hillary’s support for 25% gun tax
Back in October 1993, then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton told Congress that she was “all for” a proposed 25% national sales tax on firearms, insisting that it would be a way to put a lid on violent crime at that time.
She had been asked by Sen. Bill Bradley (D-NJ) if she would endorse the proposed tax during a hearing before the Senate Finance Committee on Sept. 30, 1993.
“I’m all for that,” Clinton said at the time. “I just don’t know what else we’re going to do to try to figure out how to get some handle on this violence.”
Now, more than two decades later as Clinton is running for the 2016 Democratic nomination, those words have come back to haunt her. Gun rights forums and chat groups lit up early last month when someone dug into the archives of the Associated Press to find the quote.
The former Secretary of State and junior senator from New York, Clinton has an established record in support of gun control measures. This history lesson of sorts was essentially a reminder of that record to potential voters next year.
Warner’s ‘gun violence’ talk chases same rabbit
On the day when anti-gunners gathered in Washington, DC, to press Congress for more restrictions on the Second Amendment, Virginia Sen. Mark Warner made a speech on the Senate floor, paying tribute to two slain WDBJ journalists and also to push a gun control agenda that gun rights activists say would not have prevented that crime.
Recalling the Aug. 26 shooting that took the lives of reporter Alison Parker and photographer Adam Ward, Warner lamented that “More than 30,000 people are killed by firearms in this country every year.” He did not mention that more of those people commit suicide than are killed in crimes.
Warner also pushed “reforms like closing the gun show loophole.” However, the person who killed Parker and Ward— former disgruntled WDBJ reporter Vester Lee Flanagan, who used the on-air name of Bryce Williams—bought his gun at a Virginia gun shop and passed a background check.
“I’ll never forget meeting with families of the Newtown victims during the days and weeks following the tragedy,” Warner said. “In their grief and loss, I think anyone would have understood if they had asked for all sorts of gun restrictions.
“But they didn’t,” he added. “They had one very reasonable, commonsense request of Congress: universal background checks, to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and those with serious mental illness.”
Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza used guns belonging to his mother. She had acquired them legally, and on the morning of the attack, Lanza murdered his mother and took her guns to the school.
“Reasonable people can disagree about exactly what approach to take,” Warner asserted, “but the facts are not up for debate. Background checks work. And they keep guns out of the hands of those who shouldn’t have them.”
But gun rights activists will quickly note that this evidently has not been the case, because they did not keep firearms out of the hands of the shooters at the Washington, DC, Navy Yard, the Aurora theater, Santa Barbara, Fort Hood (twice), Seattle or the man responsible for the slayings of the WDBJ news team.
