And you thought *Canada* was bad?

[mousme]

irishyogini has posted this information about proposed gun legislation (Blair-Holt) in the U.S.

Makes the CFRO look positively civilized, don't you think?

Food for thought, whether you're a raging Libertarian or in favour of gun control. Seems awfully over-the-top to me, but then I haven't taken a close look at it yet. I trust irishyogini when she says it doesn't look like a hoax, but will be doing some fact-checking of my own when I'm not running out the door to work.

Comments

[rdansky.livejournal.com]

http://www.snopes.com/politics/guns/blairholt.asp

Note that there is a long way to go between "proposed legislation" and "legislation with a hope in hell of passing".

[mousme.livejournal.com]

Note that there is a long way to go between "proposed legislation" and "legislation with a hope in hell of passing".

True. I have no idea if it has a hope in hell of passing, since I have a shaky grasp of how that works in the U.S.

[rdansky.livejournal.com]

At a rough guess, and I could be wrong here, this stands about as much chance of passing as does anything making Mock Swedish the official state language of Minnesota.

[irishyogini.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, this is what I found on Snopes: http://www.snopes.com/politics/guns/blairholt.asp

[dizietsma.livejournal.com]

Even if it did pass, wouldn't the NRA just shove a test case through as quickly as possible to get it challenged in the Supreme Court and thrown-out as unconstitutional?

[zercool.livejournal.com]

It's a long long way from being passed - I seem to remember this being the latest Hysteria Du Jour earlier this year - but if it were, I wouldn't count on the NRA to try the test case. GOA, 2AF, or JPFO, maybe, but the institution that didn't want to support Heller v. DC? Meh.

[fearsclave.livejournal.com]

Oh, this is nothing. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms has massacred entire religious groups down to the last infant over a failure to pay a $200 tax bill...

It's Fake

[ankhorite.livejournal.com]

Go see the Snopes link that Irishyogini gave you.

Furthermore:

Senate Bill SB-2099 will require us to put on our 2009 1040 federal tax form all guns that you have or own. It may require fingerprints and a tax of $50 per gun. This bill was introduced on Feb. 24. This bill will become public knowledge 30 days after it is voted into law. This is an amendment to the Internal Revenue Act of 1986. This means that the Finance Committee can pass this without the Senate voting on it at all. The full text of the proposed amendment is on the U.S. Senate homepage, http://www.senate.gov/ You can find the bill by doing a search by the bill number, SB-2099. You know who to call; I strongly suggest you do. Please send a copy of this e-mail to every gun owner you know.

Without addressing all the other falsities in the post (which Snopes mostly covers), I can tell you flat-out that the sentences highlighted in pink are ridiculously untrue.

All bills become public knowledge the instant they are introduced.

Amendments to our tax laws (and I'm not sure that this is one, but it's not worth checking; it's a moot point) are laws just like all our other laws, and are therefore public knowledge the day they are introduced (if not before via press release from the proud sponsors) and go through the same legislative process as every other bill in the country. The Finance Committee has no law-making authority whatsoever.

If Snopes is accurate in saying Bobby Rush is the only sponsor, even after it's been introduced twice, whatever is in it doesn't matter - it will never pass. It will probably never even be brought to a vote in committee, much less on the floor of the House.

This is nutso-fruitso black-helicopter stuff, meant to terrify people who are not familiar with the legislative process. I don't mean to hurt anyone's feelings, but that's all it is. Forgive me for not bothering to search for the putative bill number; you can discredit it 100% just based on the pink lines above, much less the rest of it. And besides, Bobby Rush is a congressman, not a senator, and "SB" is a designation for bills introduced in the Senate ("Senate Bill") -- not the House, which is where Rush sits.

Re: It's Fake

[mousme.livejournal.com]

Cool. Thanks for explaining it so thoroughly! :)

Re: It's Fake; THIS Is Real

[ankhorite.livejournal.com]

Sure - and I raised another couple of small but telling points while chatting over at Yogini's.

Anyway, this is a true story, and an excellent example of how strong the gun lobby is in the U.S. If this had passed - and it fell only two votes short - sixteen-year-old kids from Vermont, where they have the right to carry loaded and concealed - would have been able to travel nationwide, loaded and concealed.

Known as the Thune Amendment for its sponsor, this bill is completely contrary to the NRA's stated preference for "states' rights" -- that is, their preference for the primacy of state legislation regarding gun regulation -- but the NRA supported it anyway.

Thune Amendment on U.S. News & World Report (before vote)

Thune Amendment on New York Daily News (after being defeated in vote today, July 22)

Thune, Before and After in the Washington Post explaining that Thune took the lead on this to try to raise his profile within the Republican Party for a run in the 2012 election. This is because the other front runners are self-destructing (Palin, adulterer Sanford, adulterer Ensign) or unelectable (Mormon Romney).

A lot of over-the-top pro-gun legislation like this is just PR designed to get Republicans - and Dems in conservative districts - a vote they can run on, not a vote they actually intend to have any effect. But my point in raising the Thune Amendment is to show that contrary to the paranoid gabble IrishYogini found, there is nothing secretive about our gun legislation, ever, from either side.

Obama, btw, doesn't seem to give a darn either way. He didn't care during the election, and he doesn't care now. He's got other issues to address and gun control is nowhere on his agenda... no matter what Republican fundraisers or terrified racists claim.