John Lewis has blazed trails before, and this past week the Atlanta congressman again broke new ground: He led what may have been the U.S. Capitol's first sit-in against citizens' rights.
“No fly, no buy” is all the rage among Lewis and his fellow Democrats these days. Their apparent reasoning is that, if a government watch list known to be abused, misused and mistaken is good enough to deprive Americans of the freedom to travel by air, it must be good enough to deprive Americans of their Second Amendment rights, too.
Their 26-hour pizza party on the House floor came two days after Senate Democrats voted against a Republican bill to delay gun sales to anyone on a terrorist watch list, giving the government three days to persuade a judge to deny the transaction. That was too much due process for them. Or maybe it’s just that voting for the bill would have hurt their fund raising.
And to think, until last week I wasn’t sure it was possible for Democrats to be any more cynical about gun control:
After a “mass shooting,” we hear two refrains most often. First is a call to expand background checks to cover sales not involving licensed gun dealers (which already must conduct checks for any sales, including at gun shows). Second is a plea to ban “assault weapons,” a made-up term for which there’s little lexicographical agreement, because it tends to be based on cosmetic features more than function.
The problem with the first refrain is it wouldn’t have applied to any of 16 recent mass shootings reviewed by the New York Times, which worked its way backward from this month’s slayings at a gay nightclub in Orlando. In each case, the guns were bought legally from a dealer. Sometimes the guns were later stolen or illegally transferred, and sometimes the buyer should have failed the background check but didn’t. But illegal is illegal, and human error can’t be eliminated.
The problem with the second is it’s impossible to say whether any version of a ban on “assault weapons” would have prevented these crimes. From 1994 to 2004, when “assault weapons” were banned, gun makers easily altered their products to make them legal. Again, the features included in most bans are only related to the weapons’ looks, not their function or deadliness. Democrats’ pretending otherwise is just politics.
It is possible that restricting weapon sales to people on the terrorist watch list could have come into play in a handful of the shootings, including Orlando. But that should also work with a due-process provision, whether the government has three days to make its case or perhaps longer.
And this kind of list isn’t complete without a nod to those liberals out there, particularly celebrities, who dutifully rant about the sale of fully automatic weapons. Those guns have been so heavily regulated for so many decades that they’re ultra-expensive, and thus are used for crimes rarely, if ever.
After all that, Democrats are left with little more than an accusation that Republicans just want terrorists to be able to buy guns. It’s a brazen lie, and they know it. They just don’t have anything else to stand — or sit — on.
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