The message is clear, and it’s one that most lawmakers seem to have absorbed: Not only is access to guns irrelevant to this discussion; bringing it up would be downright insensitive.
USA Today's Joel Pett sums it up:
Can't even consider how Loughner got a handgun, and extended magazine or two, and ammo. Congress is only tinkering around the margins at best.
The signal piece of gun legislation to come out of the Arizona shooting looks to be a bill that Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.) plans to bring up as soon as this week. It would ban the manufacture and sale of high-capacity magazines such as the one Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’s would-be assassin, Jared Lee Loughner, attached to his Glock 19, allowing him to fire off 33 bullets without reloading, rather than the 10 or so in a typical clip.
“The only reason to have 33 bullets loaded in a handgun is to kill a lot of people very quickly,” Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), who plans to introduce McCarthy’s legislation in the Senate, said in a statement. “These high-capacity clips simply should not be on the market.”
But McCarthy and Lautenberg are up against a political consensus that has only hardened in recent years as Democrats made inroads into Republican territory largely on their ability to neutralize the gun issue. Some of their red-state victories were with pro-gun candidates such as Montana Sen. Jon Tester and Virginia Sen. Jim Webb.
“The battle over gun control is over in the sense that it’s decided that you’re allowed to have guns in this country,” former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, a pro-gun Democrat elected governor of Vermont with the endorsement of the NRA, told POLITICO in an interview.
What needs to be reopened, he said, is a debate on “common sense” measures such as whether people can buy weapons without background checks at gun shows, where and how firearms can be carried, and bans on certain types of weaponry.
He pointed to recent initiatives, such as New Hampshire’s party-line vote to allow guns to be carried in the halls of the state Legislature, as extreme measures that may provoke a backlash. “I come from a hunting state. Vermonters are very practical,” he said. “Last time I checked, there were no deer in the New Hampshire statehouse.”
Gun-control advocates hope that, because one of its own has become a victim, Congress will see things differently. But with a new, solidly pro-gun Republican majority in the House and a Senate stocked with red-state Democrats up for reelection, there are few indications of widespread conversion on the issue.
And so it goes. Not even a law banning extended magazines has any chance of passage, even after the attempted assassination of a Congresswoman and six dead around her. It's a question that won't even be asked anymore as we wonder why and how this tragedy occurred.
Not even one of Saturday's heroes will be heeded.
This evening on the Situation Room, Blitzer had on retired Army Colonel Bill Badger, in order to tell the story of his part in the takedown of Jared Loughner. I can't find any video of it, but Badger's composure and recall of detail in retelling the story makes the segment worthwhile on its own. As the interview is wrapping up, the Colonel makes use of his brief moment of fame to actually try and make something good come out of this travesty:
BLITZER: Colonel, do you own or carry a gun?
BADGER: No.
I have got a 21-year-old son. And when he was born, my wife made me get rid of .38. I had one up until that time.
But, you know, if I could say something right now, that something is drastically wrong with what's going on in our United States right now. And when an individual is turned down to get into the military and then can be -- is able to go out and buy a .9-millimeter Glock pistol, and he had one of the -- or his clips were the extended clips that were limited to law enforcement only, and, you know, that -- or somebody has to put a stop to that.
But we won't even ask.
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