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© 2013 The Sandwich Democratic Town Committee
With less than two hours to go before the U.S. Senate starts voting on amendments to the anti-gun violence bill now pending, the unimaginable seems likely. There are still not enough votes to gain passage of the legislation with near-universal background checks in place. Multiple sources are reporting that the votes are not there and this will go down in defeat, despite a level of support in every state in the country, including among Republican voters, and gun owners that rivals apple pie and motherhood. As of this moment there are 52 Senators in favor, 40 Republicans opposed, and 8 undecided. In other words, the bill’s supporters would have to win every single one of the undecided votes.
It appears that we have a whole lot of United States Senators who provide living, breathing, walking proof that you can indeed live without a spine. There they are, cowering in their proverbial closets because of what the 7% or so of Americans who do not favor universal background checks might do to them politically. Really!! And the 90%+ who do support this bill?? Despite having a pretty good facility with two languages, both of which have rich and extensive vocabularies, I quite honestly cannot think of the right words to express what I am feeling right now.
Have you no shame, Mr. Reid? Have you no shame Mr. McConnell? Have we no shame, we the electorate, we the citizens of a country that grandly and sometimes grandiosely proclaims loudly and expansively our pride in “American exceptionalism”? Does “exceptionalism” mean that when our Founding Fathers wrote about our inalienable right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” they meant “except” when one of us loves guns so much we just have to have a military grade weapon loaded with a 100-round magazine?
“Why is the ban being dropped? According to Democratic leaders, it has no chance of passing — and if it were included, Democrats wouldn’t even be able to bring it up on the Senate floor for debate. Just bringing a bill up for consideration requires all senators to agree, and if just one objects, then it takes 60 votes to keep the process moving forward.” – NBC News
How does any American politician gather up the where-with-all to stand before broadcast media, to stand before the American electorate and with a straight face proclaim that he/she must strip a ban on private ownership of military-grade armaments out of a bill because its presence would cause a filibuster?
Photo by Yuri Gripas / Reuters.
Really!? There are not 60 out of 100 United States Senators, senators in an “exceptional” nation, who are willing to trade the mere act of purchasing a military weapon because they like them, because they have a supposed “right” to possess one, for the possibility that doing so would prevent 20 more 6-7 year olds from being murdered? Have you no shame?
Well, enjoy your “right.” Enjoy your political “realities” and parliamentary “procedures” and Senate “rules”. Enjoy them now, because the screams of the next child to be riddled by a hail of bullets from a military grade weapon someone purchased because they like them, will echo up and down the halls of heaven for all eternity.
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