Posted on 02/26/2018 1:01:38 PM PST by Ellendra
A bunch of teens in Florida skipped school and went to Tallahassee to demand more of the same gun control that failed to save their classmates. Like petulant two year-olds, they whined and screamed when they werent given what they want when they want it.*
In short, they failed their civics class.
OK, kids. Heres the down and dirty on what your teachers should have taught you about how the legislative process works
David! Take the Tide Pod out of your mouth!
First, you were likely told (if told anything) that a citizen tells a legislator what he wants, the legislator drafts a bill, the bill is entered in the house/senate/whatever (this generic, as it depends on locale), it gets voted on, and the governor signs it into law.
Emma! Do not stick that fork in the electrical outlet!
Believing that to be the case, its slightly understandable why the poorly educated public school victims didnt understand their rejection. Heres the reality.
1. Citizen wants something.
He either spends months or weeks (and sometimes years) working his way through staffers until someone brings it to the legislators attention with a recommendation to submit a bill.
Sometimes there are ways to bypass the staff filters. It helps if youve made large campaign contributions in the past, or can make a credible suggestion that such are forthcoming.
The other way is to get the media on your side. In your case, CNN et al used you to push their preexisting agenda. You didnt use them. If youd used them, your class president would have created an astroturf media association, instead of a long time CNN producer pretending to be a stay-at-home mom and organizing you.
2. So the legislator knows what you want. He doesnt write the bill. He doesnt have the time. You have to write, annotations to appropriate state statutes and all. (And thats how come the NRAs fingerprints are sometimes on legislation you dont like; they remembered to do what you forgot or never knew.)
3. Congratulations, you have a proposed bill. Now Honorable Joe Blows staffers are going to throw it on the slush pile of other proposed bills. If they can get to it in time for the next session, theyll scour it for booby traps like pi equals 3.1 or legalizing naked Jello hamster/human marriage (people try that sometimes).
4. Your bill is clean. Interested legislator submits it to the calendar. Now the calendar will be checked to see if there are more bills than the legislature has time to address. If folks dont think your bill is quite as important as another, you may not make the cut. Sorry; try again next session.
Or your bill is scheduled for consideration
5. in every committee that covers any topic covered by your bill: Crime/Judiciary, Finance (its going to cost something to implement, right?), and anything else. Any one of them can stall it, or kill it.
6. Kill it? How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.
Judiciary: Wait? Were going to raise the age for rifles to eighteen because a chumbucket shot up his old school? Didnt anyone tell these kids that its already illegal for a prohibited person to buy a gun, conceal it, carry it into a gun-free zone, and kill people? We dont need this. Inexpedient To Legislate!
Finance: Umm confiscate 100,000 AR-pattern rifles? Compensating the owner for the taking at $700 to $5,000 per gun? Thats as much as half a billion bucks we dont have. If we raise taxes to fund that, none of us are getting reelected. ITL!
Or even One known, crazy, prohibited person murdered folks, and these darn kids blame the 120 million honest gunowners who didnt do it? And the one AR, when there are roughly 16 million ARs out there that werent used? And maybe three quarters of billion other firearms? Did they confuse Pods for their Adderall again? ITL!
Wait. We banned assault weapons nationwide for ten years. It didnt work then; why would it work now? ITL!
Ill give you a hint for improving your odds: All that lobbying and campaign-donating you did for Joe Blow? Youd better have greased up several more legislators as well.
And then theres the amendment process to fix perceived flaws in your bill. Remember that.
But lets say your bill, after months of wrangling, is scheduled for a floor vote. That brings us to Thursdays scholastic fiasco..
Kinda.
7. Did I mention that you need a bill sponsor in the other legislative body, too? That your bill has to pass both houses? You were doing all of the above with Senator Jack Sucks, right?
But back to Thursday. You ignorant kids tried to jump the line. You dont get to do that at Disney World, and it doesnt work in the capitol. What you did was piss off a lot of other people who did bother to spend the bucks, and months or years, to get their own bills equally or more important in their eyes. You told them that your bill isnt important enough to work at, but tis more important than them.
You just blew off a lot of people, including potential allies.
8. So your bill makes to the floor. Ill bet it was going to a vote. Sorry, kids; floor debate time. If youre lucky, it might only take a day or two. But for something as controversial as the large-scale abrogation of human/civil rights, you could be looking at weeks of debate.
In both chambers.
But say the bill(s) finally get voted on, and somehow pass.
You thought it was going to the governor, didnt you? Why, bless your hearts.
9. Now the house and senate bills go to reconciliation, because, what with committee changes and floor amendments, even if you got sponsors for identical bills in both chambers, its virtually impossible for both to have made it through with identical changes. Another committee has to iron out those differences. While procedures vary, expect the final markup bill to go back to the respective chambers for a final vote.
This politics shit aint as easy as you thought, huh, cupcake?
But in your happy-go-lucky world, the bill finally reaches the governor.
10. Will he sign or veto? Will he ponder, Photogenic cry-on-demand kids backed by a CNN producer versus a really large opposed voting bloc. Can I still get reelected if I sign? Or will not signing get me tossed?
Ill guarantee that your opposition has been hammering the govs office with letters, faxes, emails, SMS, and phone calls the whole time. Did you?
A. The governor vetos. Back to the chambers, repeat most of above and hope you can bribe up the votes to override.
B. Happy, happy, joy, joy! He signs it. You now have a law and ARs magically evaporate, or whatever.
11. Well No. Your shiny law may have an effective date on signing or in the future. Either way, it isnt really enforceable until the law gets edited into state statutes. If you didnt include an amnesty period for silly stuff like turning in firearms, you made instant criminals of 100,000 honest people.
But you have another problem. The courts.
What; you thought you were done when the gov signed your class tyranny project?
The fact is, very, very good lawyers are going to file suits against enforcement of your Intolerable Act. Theyre going to bring up MILLER, LAMONT, CAETANO, HELLER, MCDONALD, and BOWERS vs. DEVITO. Do you even know what those are? Then WTF are you doing pontificating on firearms policy?
An attorney who really wants to ridicule you will cite HAYNES, and note that your law doesnt apply to felons.
In your defense, with exception of Thomas, the Supreme Court has misplaced its one testicle. SO if you can get the circuit court to uphold part of your law, you might get a partial victory.
So your law is law. Good luck with that. California, Connecticut, and New York tried registering assault weapons (making them among those rare places where the term means anything). Care to guess how that went?
CA: 2.33% compliance. Over 97% of gunowners told them to fribble off. CT: 13.44% compliance, with the rest more or less saying, Try it. NY: 4.45% compliance. The rest were too busy giggling to issue a statement.
That was just registration. Not confiscation. Do you really want to try your luck? Or, rather, the luck of the cops youre sending out to do the dirty deeds? (Unless you were volunteering to take point. No?)
Ive noticed that some victim disarming idiots point to Australias success in firearms confiscation. But have you wondered why they keep having new amnesty periods? Ill give you a hint: After 22 years of confiscations and amnesties, the Australian government now estimates they have achieved approximately 20% compliance.
Closer to home, California began a confiscation program. As an example of how well thats working:
"Santa Cruz County law enforcement agencies teamed up with agents from the California Department of Justice Bureau of Firearms for a two-day operation on Tuesday and Wednesday to recover guns owned by individuals who are prohibited from possessing them, according to the Santa Cruz County Law Enforcement Chiefs Association."
Multiple agencies from the state and local levels. Two days. 47 addresses. They have the addresses and names because they have registration. If these laws work, they knew exactly where to go to arrest who with what.
They were able to bust one guy. With one gun.
California has a backlog of some ten thousand new prohibited persons (and growing). At the rate of one half a gun per day, that will take how long
Thats a math test. Answer it. No; it isnt common core, so the right answer matters.
20,000 days. Just shy of 55 years. Not counting people constantly joining the list.
Lecture over. Its time for your final exam.
Telling your anti-rights agenda teachers to shove their candyland version of politics gets you an automatic passing grade.
Figuring out you were wrong about the whole thing is an A+.
* Side note: You kids played hooky from school. A legislator paid for your transportation to and from Tallahassee, and bought your meals. Such a sacrifice on your part.
All those grownups who showed up to oppose your CNNs 18 U.S. Code § 241 production? They took unpaid time off work to defend their rights (and yours, though you havent figured that out yet). They paid their own ways, and bought their own food. They sacrificed for something they truly care about.
Youd best factor that principled and dedicated opposition into your plans.
Pretty darned good. Bumping to the top!
In short, they want the US to be North Korea, and they would love to replace DJT with Fat Boi. Fortunately, as noted many years ago by Admiral Yamamoto, there's still a rifle behind every blade of grass, and many of them would die trying to make that happen.
Went to my congressman and he said, quote:
I’d like to help you son, but you’re too young to vote.
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1. I'm not letting the crybabies of the Tide Pod generation decide what my basic rights are, nor those of my kids or grandkids, particularly since I wasn't within 1,000 miles of their school when someone that THEY ostracized went batshit crazy and shot a bunch of people.
2. Even if they were all learned professors of the law, and had some fairly cogent arguments for limiting (or, umm, INFRINGING UPON) the rights protected by the 2nd Amendment, this would be my answer:
NO! Your move.
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