NRA, GOP Shoot Down Gun Safety Measures
The Senate plans to vote Monday on four gun control proposals — including banning the sale of assault rifles to anyone on the terror watch list — and all will be shot down because obeying the National Rifle Association is a higher priority, especially among Republicans, than the safety and well-being of their constituents.
A Democrat filibuster forced GOP leaders to schedule votes on several gun safety measures, but even with the support of some endangered Republican senators the effort is doomed. And even if by some miracle the Senate passed anything it would die in the arch-conservative-dominated House of Representatives despite overwhelming public support
Donald Trump, a new NRA convert, has said that few if any people would have been killed in the shooting in Orlando's Pulse nightclub last week if everyone there had been armed. Even the NRA thinks Trump "defies common sense." "No one thinks that people should go into a nightclub drinking and carrying firearms," said NRA top lobbyist Chris Cox.
If the NRA and its Republican acolytes were unmoved by the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre of small children (by a white Christian), don't expect any more than crocodile tears over the mass murder of at least 50 people at a gay night club in Orlando.
Can you imagine the GOP-led Congress, with its dismal record on gay rights, doing anything to help protect the LGBT community or fail to do the bidding of the NRA?
Once again, the victims of a gun atrocity will have died in vain, just as the children at Newtown, because those like GOP and NRA put their love of guns above their love of human life. That won't go down well with the many Jewish groups that have for years made reasonable, responsible gun control a domestic priority.
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) sent his "heartfelt prayers" to the Orlando victims but don't expect more from the man who has received $136,639 from the NRA's Political Action Committee over the years to block all gun safety legislation, according to Public Campaign, a non-profit proponent of campaign finance reform.
Senate Majority Leader McConnell (R-Kentucky), who decides what legislation makes it to the floor and which dies, has received $1,262,189 from the NRA since 1989, according to Mic.com. He's one of nine senators who together have received more than $22 million from the NRA in their careers. By sheer coincidence all are leading opponents of all legislation to prevent gun violence, and all are Republicans.
Of the 50 senators who voted against a "no fly, not buy" amendment last December, 48, all Republicans, were recipients of more than $27 million in NRA money; the lone Democrat, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, and Rand Paul of Kentucky, the lone Republican, got no NRA money, according to Reverbpress.com.
As long as the NRA and its supplicants in Congress block efforts to ban assault rifles like the AR-15 and high capacity ammunition magazines like those used in Orlando, Sandy Hook, Aurora and San Bernardino, there will be more mass murders and the death toll will continue to climb at its current alarming pace.
A GOP that preaches about the "right to life" for the unborn shows an alarming contempt for the right to life for 350 million living Americans.
Instead they genuflect to the gun lobby and march behind the "Make American Hate Again" banner of a presumptive GOP presidential nominee who is temperamentally unsuited for the high office he seeks.