Replies

I don't agree .. I think it was a set-up by the repubs.

The repubs wanted a clean bill. First they had to kill the bill with the amendments. They did! Now they can start over with a clean bill - after the November elections, when they can get it through the senate - clean!!

The rats think they defeated us - when in reality I believe the repubs have just pulled off a coup against the dems.

And .. the repubs have put the dems ON THE CONGRESSIONAL RECORD FOR BEING AGAINST UNFAIR GUN LAWSUITS, and voting against the bill they had loaded with amendments. This is just too cool.

First off, the Republicans aren't smart enough to do anything as devious as what you are suggesting. Further more all of the amendments had Republican authors or sponsers so Republicans voted to add all of the amendments. The Dems would have been on the Congressional Record as being against gun lawsuits if they would have just passed the clean bill. Also you have a ton of Republicans voting against outlawing the gun lawsuits. Which makes great ads for the Dems, I can see it now "Kerry and 89 other members of the Senate, including x Republicans, voted to let people recover money from negligent gun companies, why does the President keep pushing this extreme gun agenda?" The Dems played the Republicans like fiddle throughout this debate. There is no Republican leadership in the Senate.

Just got this from GOA...

Great News!
-- Feinstein semi-auto ban is dead, as Senate shoots down gun
control bill

Gun Owners of America E-Mail Alert
8001 Forbes Place, Suite 102, Springfield, VA 22151
Phone: 703-321-8585 / FAX: 703-321-8408
http://www.gunowners.org

Tuesday, March 2, 2004

It got quite ugly today in the U.S. Senate.

First, the U.S. Senate voted to renew the Feinstein semi-auto ban.
Then it voted for the McCain gun show ban. All this in addition to
the "Lock Up Your Safety" requirement that Senators tacked on to the
lawsuit protection bill last week.

You will remember that Gun Owners of America had warned senators
last week to oppose S. 1805 if it was loaded down with gun control
provisions. Thankfully, pro-gun senators heeded the call to kill
the bill once it was turned into an anti-gun abomination. These
senators were joined by their anti-gun counterparts who opposed the
underlying bill because they still want to bankrupt the gun makers.

The final vote on defeating S. 1805 was 90-8.

You can see how your Senators voted on the gun control amendments at
http://www.gunowners.org/cgv.htm on the GOA website. The following
describes the critical provisions that were tacked on to the lawsuit
protection bill before it was soundly defeated:

Lock Up Your Safety Requirement

Senator Herb Kohl (D-WI) offered this gun control amendment last
week. It would require all handgun purchasers to pay an implicit
"gun tax" by requiring them to buy a trigger lock when they purchase
their handgun, irrespective of need. In addition, the amendment
would create a broad and implicit cause of action against gun owners
who fail to actually use the storage device to lock up their
firearms. Of course, a locked gun then becomes unavailable for
self-defense. The Senate passed the Kohl amendment 70-27.

Feinstein Semi-auto Ban

The Senate voted 52-47 in favor of the Feinstein semi-auto
amendment. This amendment would extend the ban that was signed into
law by President Clinton in 1994 -- a ban which outlaws certain
magazines and more than 180 types of semi-automatic firearms.
Unless Congress authorizes such an extension, the ban will sunset
in September 2004.

McCain Gun Show Ban

Senator John McCain (R-AZ) offered this amendment to outlaw the
private sale of firearms at gun shows, unless the buyer agrees to
submit to a background registration check. The language could
effectively eliminate gun shows because every member of an
organization sponsoring a gun show could be imprisoned if the
organization fails to notify each and every "person who attends the
special firearms event of the requirements [under the Brady Law]."
Thus, if the person responsible for handing out "Brady pamphlets"
took a break to go to the bathroom, everyone responsible for the
event could be sent to prison. The McCain amendment passed 53-47.

Ammunition Restriction Study

This amendment, offered by Senators Bill Frist (R-TN) and Larry
Craig (R-ID), passed the Senate 85-12. Among other things, the
language of this provision would commission the Attorney General to
determine whether the ban on so-called "cop killer" ammunition
should include superior performance bullets in popular hunting
calibers such as the 30-06.

The good news is that the attempt to renew the Feinstein semi-auto
ban is dead... for now. Of course, there are still semi-auto ban
bills pending in the House and Senate, and we can expect Feinstein
to again offer her gun ban as an amendment to some other "must pass"
bill.

The bad news is that the prospects for getting any kind of
legislation to the President's desk this year to protect gun makers
is very slim.

Today's vote makes it very difficult for a pro-gun senator to offer
this bill as an amendment to another bill. After all, anti-gunners
can demand that any provision to protect the gun industry now be
offered as a "package" with the anti-gun amendments that were
attached to the bill over the last couple of days.

It would have been far better for Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN)
to have brought this Senate bill to the floor in such a way that NO
gun control amendments could have been offered. Doing so would have
involved using parliamentary tactics that are somewhat difficult to
detail in an e-mail alert. But the Senate has often used these
tactics in the past. A vote to pass a "clean bill" could very well
have succeeded, as almost 60 Senators had cosponsored the underlying
legislation.

GOA wants to thank all of its members and activists for calling and
e-mailing their Senators over the last several days. The outpouring
of opposition from grassroots gun owners kept phones ringing off the
hook in Senate offices, and to be sure, contributed to pulling
several "fence sitters" to our side on the Feinstein amendment.

Again, you can see that vote at http://www.gunowners.org/cgv.htm
along with all the others.

Professional politicians are among the worst vermin on the face of the earth and it matters little what party they call home. They generally give prostitution a bad name; so much so that a $50 street hooker displays more honesty then the $10 million Senator. This whole affair reeks of game-playing and the whole damn lot of 'em are part of the problem. Every one of the scumbags has now gotten what he/she wanted: campaign year rhetoric with which to fool the "folks back home" once again.

On top of that, they ALL took a hell of a lot of money from a series of PACs including the NRA-ILA, GOA, AGS, The Brady Boob/Million Morons, and the best (and biggest spenders of them all) the LAWYERS PACs. In the end the only people who "won" are the Senators themselves and the big money lawyers. As a professional group, lawyers' PACs spend the most money "buying" the whores in Congress.

Everybody is bitching about something in this little episode; at the end of the day, not one damn thing was won or lost in terms of the "culture wars" or the RKBA, or the War on Freedom; every issue that the bastards voted on is still viable one way or the other; nothing is ever "dead" with any certainty in politics. Its like the King Vampire; no matter how many times you think you've finally knocked him off, he always manages to "come back from the grave" for one more atrocity.

The blood-suckers in the Senate know this; unfortunately, there is no wooden stake big enough to drive through the heart of that monster known as the US Senate so as to end our misery once and for all. No, all this crap will be back in one form or the other - evil never sleeps and politics is the very essence of evil incarnate.

And .. the repubs have put the dems ON THE CONGRESSIONAL RECORD FOR BEING AGAINST UNFAIR GUN LAWSUITS, and voting against the bill they had loaded with amendments. This is just too cool.

First off, the Republicans aren't smart enough to do anything as devious as what you are suggesting. Further more all of the amendments had Republican authors or sponsers so Republicans voted to add all of the amendments. The Dems would have been on the Congressional Record as being against gun lawsuits if they would have just passed the clean bill. Also you have a ton of Republicans voting against outlawing the gun lawsuits. Which makes great ads for the Dems, I can see it now "Kerry and 89 other members of the Senate, including x Republicans, voted to let people recover money from negligent gun companies, why does the President keep pushing this extreme gun agenda?" The Dems played the Republicans like fiddle throughout this debate. There is no Republican leadership in the Senate.

Don't forget that there were ten Republicans who voted for the bill along with Feinstein, and Boxer. Whatever defeats we can send the Democrats need to include these Republican enemies as well:

Chafee R-RI,
Collins R-ME,
DeWine R-OH,
Fitzgerald R-IL,
Gregg R-NH,
Lugar R-IN,
Smith R-OR,
Snowe R-ME,
Vonovich R-OH,
Warner R-VA