While President Biden moves along with his pro-forma comments and leftist talking points on guns (and everything else), Democrat lawmakers are exasperating the activists by showing little interest ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.
Democrats expect to lose seats massively in the House and may also lose their one VP-vote majority in the Senate as well.
Monday marked the fourth anniversary of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Biden used the anniversary to call on Congress to pass his moribund gun-control legislation in limbo in the Senate for a year. His call may be falling on deaf ears, even as Democrats nominally control both houses of Congress.
The Hill reports:
Negotiations between Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) stalled out over the summer, and there’s been little to no talk in the Senate Democratic Caucus about picking up two gun control bills that passed the House in March.
Igor Volsky, the co-founder of Guns Down America, said that Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) promised anti-gun violence groups the Senate would vote on background checks legislation in the summer of 2021, but the bills didn’t make it to the floor.
“We’ve been promised by Senate Majority Leader Schumer as far back as March, April that there would be a vote during the summer, then it got pushed back even further. They’re using this familiar playbook of making all kinds of promises during the campaign and then fail to deliver anything when they’re in power,” Volsky said.
Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), who represents a state where hunting is a popular pastime and where nearly two-thirds of adults live in homes with firearms, said the subject of gun control legislation hardly ever came up for discussion within the Senate Democratic Caucus during Biden’s first year in office.
“It hasn’t come up in conversation in the last year,” he told The Hill shortly before Thanksgiving.
Sen. Joe Manchin, the moderate Democrat from West Virginia, said the staunch Republican opposition “makes it very difficult” to get something through the Senate.
It appears America’s Second Amendment rights are relatively safe, at least for now.
