Pull the trigger, Congress
Two weeks after the umpteenth massacre of innocent people with an assault rifle prompted Americans to rise up and scream “enough,” Republicans in Congress are already reverting to their disgusting but typical footdragging on gun safety. They must not get away with it again. Soon after Nikolas Cruz mowed down person after person in the space of five minutes at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., President Trump and other Republicans in the House and Senate signaled they might finally, finally open their minds to limiting access to the killing equipment that enabled his mass murder.
At the very least, they said, they’d quickly plug gaping holes in the federal background check system, which a few mass shootings ago let a domestic abuser get ahold of a weapon, and this time let a disturbed 19-year-old arm himself to the teeth.
Yet despite those pledges, even that bare minimum measure now seems to have stalled.
In a CNN town hall last week, Sen. Marco Rubio promised families of the Parkland dead that he would move to expedite passage of the legislation immediately upon return to session, on Monday. That was two days ago. Didn’t happen.
On the House side, this simple measure remains attached to an obscene bill that happens to be the NRA’s top priority — which would let anyone licensed to carry a weapon in one state carry it any other state.
Let it sink in: House Speaker Paul Ryan won’t pass legislation to make the existing background check system work as intended unless he can simultaneously put states’ rights to write their own gun laws in the crosshairs.
Much less strengthen that system by requiring background checks on private sales and gunshow sales. Much less tweak the legal age of assault rifle ownership.
Much less do away with bump stocks, the devices that turn semiautomatic rifles into fully automatic ones, which helped a man murder 58 people in Las Vegas in October.
At this rate, it’ll take the deaths of hundreds more Americans before Congress even dares to contemplate limiting access to those weapons again. We are one sick nation.