By Dave Workman
Senior Editor
Anti-gun US Senator Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) effort to ban so-called “assault weapons” will not be part of the Democrats’ gun control legislative package in April, but she will be allowed to submit the ban as an amendment.
Feinstein’s proposal to also limit magazine capacity may have a better chance, and it will apparently be up for two different votes, first as part of the overall ban and then as a stand-alone measure.
The disclosure about Feinstein’s proposed ban came after she met behind closed doors with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV). Political observers suspect that Reid did not want Democrat senators facing a vote on the measure because so many are up for re-election in 2014, and gun owning voters have long memories. Democrats also recall that in 1994, their party lost control of Congress over a vote to ban semi-automatics under the Clinton administration.
Feinstein’s bill had passed on a narrow 10-8 strict party line vote by the Senate Judiciary Committee five days earlier. Even then, political prognosticators were suggesting that the ban would never make it out of the Senate, and if it did, the House would kill the measure.
The decision came after anti-gun New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg revealed that he had shifted his attention away from the ban and toward pushing a “universal background check” measure. Bloomberg reportedly believes that the background check measure has the best chances of being passed into law, suggesting that the gun prohibition lobby is playing a piecemeal political game of continued gun rights erosion, according to many in the gun rights community.
In an e-mail to TGM, Gary Marbut with the Montana Shooting Sports Association asserted that the exercise was “smoke and mirrors.”
“Universal background check…was the real target all along,” he alleged.
Marbut also believes that a background check measure will be a registration scheme in disguise.
Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA), also said that the fight is hardly over and that gun owners need to continue contacting their two senators and members of Congress. He noted the importance of this grassroots pressure because of the second, separate vote on just magazine bans.
Feinstein’s gun ban measure, Gottlieb suggested, would not get 60 votes, and that’s why it is not included in the gun control package. However, this means she will still be able to submit it, and that will play to her liberal base, but at least some Democrats will defect on the measure, and Republicans are a solid voting block against it.
Because Democrats are looking ahead to the mid-term election next year, many who may be vulnerable do not want a toxic gun ban vote on their records.
