WASHINGTON — Senior Democrats have reached agreement with the National Rifle Association on what could be the first federal gun-control legislation since 1994, a measure to significantly strengthen the national system that checks the backgrounds of gun buyers. The sensitive talks began in April, days after a mentally ill student killed 32 people at Virginia Tech University. The shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, had been judicially ordered to submit to a psychiatric evaluation, which should have disqualified him from buying handguns. But the state of Virginia never forwarded that information to the federal National Instant Check System, and the massacre exposed a loophole in the 13-year-old background-check program. Under the agreement, participating states would be given monetary enticements for the first time to keep the federal background database up to date, as well as penalties for failing to comply.
Man, if this cautionary tale doesn’t serve as vivid illustration of politics making for strange bedfellows, I don’t know what does. And in the end, it looks like the National Rifle Association comes out of the agreement looking like the just did they mayor’s 16-year-old daughter in the driver’s seat of a Pontiac convertible while roaring through downtown at 80 MPH. Democrats, as usual, look as if they couldn’t get laid if they walked through Cracktown with $100 bills and packets of Bolivian Marching Powder pinned to their Brooks Brothers suits.
While I would imagine that some sort of agreement is better than none at all, how many more Columbines or Virginia Techs do we need before Congress has the balls to stand up to the NRA and say “ENOUGH!”. Yes, I’m aware of the Second Amendment (something about the right to arm bears, if memory serves….), but unlike some folks, I don’t believe the right to bear arms is absolute, inalienable, and undeniable. MORE guns would have done nothing to prevent either Columbine nor Virginia Tech. Turning schools and other public gathering places into potential free-fire zones will, if anything, only make things worse. When everyone’s carrying, who do you shoot?
To sign on to the deal, the powerful gun lobby won significant concessions from Democratic negotiators. Individuals with minor infractions in their pasts could petition their states to have their names removed from the federal database, and about 83,000 military veterans, put into the system by the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2000 for alleged mental health reasons, would have a chance to clean their records.
The federal government would be permanently barred from charging gun buyers or sellers a fee for their background checks. In addition, faulty records such as duplicative names or expunged convictions would have to be scrubbed from the database.
“The NRA worked diligently with the concerns of gun owners and law enforcement in mind to make a … system that’s better for gun owners and better for law enforcement,” said House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell, D-Mich., who led the talks.
The agreement is a marriage of convenience for both sides. Democratic leaders are eager to show that they can respond legislatively to the Virginia Tech rampage, a feat that GOP leaders could not muster after the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado. Meanwhile, the NRA was motivated to show it would not stand in the way of a bill that would not harm law-abiding gun buyers.
All this agreement really does is to provide a smoke screen. Both sides can go back to their core constituents and beat their breasts while extolling their “accomplishments”. Does it, or will it, do ANYTHING to keep us safer? Will it keep another Dylan Kleibold, Eric Harris, or Seung-Hui Cho from obtaining the tools of their bloody trade? I have to be willing to wait and see, because there’s frankly no other choice.
I hope this agreement works, because the alternative isn’t pretty. Unfortunately, I find it difficult to be optimistic. When such disparate groups as Congressional Democrats and the NRA are working at cross-purposes from such vast ideological and philosophical distances, the late Tip O’Neill’s definition of politics- the art of the possible- seems horribly inadequate.
