California Democrat Congressman Mike Thompson will push legislation for national “universal” background checks. (Screen snip, YouTube)
By Dave Workman
Senior Editor
Newly-powerful House Democrats are planning to take control this month by launching efforts to further erode the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.
According to The Hill, they “plan to push a bill to require a background check for every gun sale in America.”
The news agency, citing a story in Mother Jones, said Rep. Mike Thompson (D-CA) plans to introduce the legislation.
But the Hill reminded its readers that “several recent mass shooters, including the gunman who killed 17 people in Parkland Florida last February, passed background checks to obtain their firearms.” This has been a major issue with rights activists who are constantly on guard against new gun control schemes. All the gun laws previously adopted at the state or federal level have not lived up to expectations by not preventing the mass shootings or other crimes they were ostensibly adopted to stop.
Mother Jones confirmed that anti-gun Democrats have been a busy bunch, even before the Nov. 6 election handed them back control of the U.S. House.
“The move has been in the works since before the election,” the news organ revealed, “when Thompson met with outside gun reform allies like the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, Everytown for Gun Safety, the Center for American Progress, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, and Giffords to talk about what they might push for if Democrats won the House.”
This is another example of what rights activists increasingly refer to as “camo-speak” because the term “gun reform” simply means “gun control” in disguise, they contend. Indeed, one of the key tenets of a “Conversation Guide” published by the Giffords group was “Don’t use the phrase ‘gun control.’” Another bit of advice in that list of things not to do was to “talk about stricter or new gun laws.”
This guide is reminiscent of the “gun control playbook” discovered several years ago by Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation and chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. He co-authored a book about that booklet titled “Dancing in Blood.”
Giffords is the group founded by former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, former astronaut Mark Kelly after Giffords was seriously wounded and several other people were killed in Tucson in what may have been an assassination attempt that turned into a mass shooting. The man responsible had passed a background check.
Mother Jones lamented that, “According to a 2017 study in the Annals of Internal Medicine, which was funded in part by supporters of gun control, 22 percent of US gun owners obtained a firearm without a background check over the past two years.” Many Second Amendment activists see nothing wrong with that, and over the years, many gun owners have contended that so-called “universal background checks” amount to the creation of a de facto gun registry.
