Cowardly Cause Meets Deadly Effect

I have a news bulletin for the Democratic congressional leadership in Washington; we are the party of gun control, like it or not, and it’s about time you grew a spine over this issue once and for all.

This story tells us that the proliferation of assault weapons, the AK-47 in particular, has led to the point where police must rearm themselves to compensate for that fact …

"This is a national problem. Police agencies all over the U.S. are going to bigger weapons," said (Miami Police Commissioner John) Timoney, whose agency now has about 50 AR-15s and expects to get 150 more. He blames the 2004 expiration of the federal ban on assault weapons for the escalation of heavily armed violence.

And funny, but I haven’t heard a Dem speak out on this since that French-loving, Botox-injecting John Kerry did so in the 2004 presidential campaign here (tongue-in-cheek with that remark, I assure you); I and many others criticized him for reacting too late to the smears and not realizing soon enough what the campaign was truly about, but he was dead on to protest the expiration of the assault weapons ban (also, Mike Castle and Christopher Shays, two House Repugs who have since entered “full mooner” territory, said the right things also).

And just like the prior post, we have a situation where we can encourage Dem-sponsored congressional legislation on this issue, and that would be the Assault Weapons Ban and Law Enforcement Protection Act of 2007 by House Rep Carolyn McCarthy of New York here (I don’t understand the point in regulating the barrel shroud either; the clip size is what matters the most - a certain conservative, bow-tie-wearing TV personality who just lost his show called out McCarthy on that...also, please note what happened with similar legislation in the 108th and 109th Congresses).

Also, this gives me a chance to blow up some popular fiction that I’ve picked up from various print and electronic sources, and that is the notion that the Dems lost Congress in 1994 over the assault weapons ban. I don’t know how this got started, but it seemed to “go viral” pretty quick.

The reason the Dems lost Congress was because the Clinton Administration was still trying to recover from the “don’t ask, don’t tell” flap along with the demonization of Hillary Clinton’s health care initiative, to say nothing of the (wise, in retrospect) tax increases in Clinton’s budget (The Big Dog should send a remembrance to former Dem Montco House Rep Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky every year since her vote approved Clinton’s budget in ‘93, and she was subsequently voted out of office for it). I can also remember the frenzied caterwauling from “Dr. McLaughlin’s Gong Show” among others at that time over Clinton’s crime prevention ideas such as midnight basketball and other attempts to keep kids busy who otherwise would be shooting up (guns or drugs actually) or jacking somebody’s car.

And the loudest critic of all was a certain Newton Leroy Gingrich, whose face was seemingly on every TV station and in every newspaper or magazine anywhere you looked.

So, while the assault weapons ban represented part of the dissatisfaction against Clinton by some out there who would never support him anyway, I think it’s ridiculous to assign the ’94 loss entirely over that issue.