NICS deal – hey, lets’ pay for stuff that’s already law
You’ve probably heard by now that the NRA and Democrats reached a compromise on the band aid after Virginia Tech err NICS improvement act. Overall, not a bad deal, really. It looks to have a means of getting firearms rights back if convicted of minor infractions. Of course, currently this was the case but Congress never funded it nor did Congress fund appeals to have rights reinstated. Looks like the feds will be picking up the tab for the checks and offer incentives to states to keep the database up to date (which it rarely is because there were not standards and each state was on their own). I wonder how this will affect states that have their own system, like Tennessee.
Bitter thinks it’s good, so does Sebastian. Joe’s not happy. Jeff has more.
What do I think? I think it’s the same as it always was. It’s just funded now.
Oh, and I think highlighting the political impotence of Carolyn McCarthy is beautiful.
June 10th, 2007 at 2:24 pm
[…] sums it up as “NICS deal – hey, lets’ pay for stuff that’s already law“, which I think is accurate if the WaPo’s reporting is correct on this. We’re […]
June 10th, 2007 at 2:58 pm
Snubbing McCarthy is great. It shows that even on her pet issue, she can’t get anything done. The anti-gun folks will paint this as a victory though. They have to. If they had to go back to their supporters and tell them “Even with a Democratic congress, after the biggest mass shooting in US history, we couldn’t get anything done”, they’d be completely dead politically. So they’ll spin whatever they can get as a victory, even if it’s really a defeat.
That’s one thing working in favor of this staying a clean bill. They need something to pass they can spin as a victory. If they go tacking on, say, assault weapons bans or any other pet project, they’ll sink bill and won’t get squat.
Some will say that this means we should have just opposed anything, to deliver exactly that stunning defeat, but that presumes, had no moderate elements in the Democratic Congress worked with the NRA, nothing would have advanced. Given the leadership in the house and senate are not staffed by people friendly to the cause, that’s a very bold assumption.
I also wouldn’t discount the future benefits of having a cadre of Democrats, who are pro-gun or moderately pro-gun, willing to work with the concerns of gun owners, willing to work with NRA, and now have built themselves some more political clout in a Congress who’s leadership would love nothing more than to see you and I disarmed and defenseless.
June 10th, 2007 at 3:07 pm
You know, with all the lip service that “transparency in government” gets, it really, really pisses me off that we can’t start digesting this newly made “sausage”.
I’m sure the plan here is for both the NRA and the gun hatin’ Dems to run this little compromise up the pole and see how there base reacts.
However, both parties have access to the proposed bill that came out of the compromise, why the heck do we not get to see it? Instead of the proto-bill in black and white we get to rely on rumors leaked from the oh so technically accurate and totally unbiased Washington Post.
June 10th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
Part of the reason in politics you keep this kind of early stage negotiating private is to keep politicians from having to act like politicians. If they know the public is watching, they tend to act like a bunch of pandering assholes, which isn’t conducive to the actual process of hammering out deals and drafting legislation. The bill has yet to be introduced, and this indeed is a floater to see the reaction. The public debate over the bill will begin once it’s introduced, but for political purposes, it’s always a good idea to have your ducks lined up before that, so you don’t have any surprises. You know, like tacking on assault weapons ban surprises.
June 10th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
errata:
s/compromise up the pole and see how there base reacts\
/compromise up the flagpole and see how their base reacts/g
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That’s fine, but they have had their little deal session in the smoke filled back room already. Let us see it.
At the very least their ought to be something – outside of say 24 hours – on the NRA’s website. They do lobby on our behalf, right? You can guaran-damn-tee yourself that you will never get the straight shit from the WaPo on anything firearms related.
Or should we go back to the time like when the Lautenberg Amendment was passed, and well after the bill became law, we get an explanation from those “I’m the NRA” people telling us how they saved us from something even worse?
Yea, I’m the NRA too, I pay them to lobby on my behalf, but I don’t trust them 100%.
June 10th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
No, the NRA does not lobby on our behalf. They lobby on behalf of the administration of the NRA and their salaries. That requires them to lobby against their members’ interests in order to keep the problem. For without the problem, all those “send more money” letters would be difficult to justify.
June 10th, 2007 at 7:48 pm
At the very least their ought to be something – outside of say 24 hours – on the NRA’s website.
Wow. I do wish that they would have been first with this story, but that’s asking an awful lot.
The policy folks didn’t even finish the deal until late on Friday. The web guys probably didn’t find out until after they left the office, if they were told at all on Friday. Most of the folks at NRA do give up many, many hours of their personal time for the cause. But don’t expect them to work every weekend for their generally low salaries.
How many people here are working at or near the bottom of their pay scale and already dedicate beyond standard working hours to their job at one of the most hated organizations in the nation? If you do, perhaps I’ll take your opinion on if you would be first to jump up and write a web thing, also interrupting your policy colleagues who already put in long hours to work the deal during their time off.
Let’s have to real expectations, folks. I certainly have my thoughts for NRA improvements, but I also take into account that they are normal folks working in a big bureaucracy who generally make less than they are worth because they care about the cause.
June 10th, 2007 at 11:17 pm
Sorry. Is Monday at midnight too much to ask? Or do you think that someone needs to type in a bunch of hand-written notes or something?
OK Bitter, here’s where I’m coming with this:
After days of door-to-door gun seizures in New Orleans, we finally got a strongly worded press statement from the NRA.
nraila.org/CurrentLegislation/Read.aspx?ID=1731
Because it never went mainstream media, the NRA never said squat to its members about the door-to-door gun seizures that happened in Maryland during the Beltway “sniper” incident.
gunweek.com/2002/hs111002.html
Ditto when Ohio firearms owners marched in protest while open-carrying. I think those Ohio marches will be looked back on as defining moments in the right-to-carry movement, but I sure as hell didn’t hear about them from the NRA.
buckeyefirearms.org/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=60
And of course, I’ve already mentioned the back door wheeling and dealing that got us the Lautenberg Amendment.
June 12th, 2007 at 1:34 am
Still nothing on the NRA’s site, but I thought that this news story deserved mention.
newsday.com totally spins the Carolyn McCarthy involvement, or the WaPo is lying about her being snubbed, or something. Although if you read carefully, it never really states that McCarthy and the NRA negotiated, Anyway:
McCarthy, NRA to work together on gun bill
June 12th, 2007 at 11:47 am
That’s what McCarthy’s office is saying. If you got shut out on your key, well, actually, the only issue, that you keep running for Congress on, you’d try to spin things so it looks like you’re on the inside slugging it through the mud with all the other legislators who can get things done.
We still don’t have a bill yet. If there’s a bill introduced, and she’s just a co-sponsor, then she was totally shut out of the process, and all her office did was “sign off” on the deal by agreeing to cosponsor someone else’s bill.
If he bill moves forward, then she was probably more involved than we were lead to believe by the Washington Post article.
But we don’t know yet. We won’t until we see a bill.
June 13th, 2007 at 9:05 am
[…] database that is used to determine if the purchase of a firearm is a prohibited person. As I said before, the measure seems to offer incentives in the form of grants to states that keep their NICS data up […]