7 of 9 Gun Bills DEFEATED - 2 Remain for Vote Thursday. Now is not the time to relax

Obama Calls 2nd Amendment Supporters Liars, Vows to Defeat Them

By Associated Press April 18, 2013 6:55 am

http://www.gopusa.com/freshink/files...um-300x180.jpg WASHINGTON - A visibly infuriated President Barack Obama surrounded himself with tear-stained parents of Connecticut school shooting victims Wednesday after the Senate voted down a measure designed to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and declared it a "pretty shameful day for Washington."

The Senate, which is controlled by the president's own party, handed him a stinging first defeat for his second term by voting down a bipartisan compromise to expand background checks for gun buyers. The disappointment was all over the faces of Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, their mouths turned into deep frowns as they appeared in the Rose Garden shortly after the vote.

"The fact is most of these senators could not of offer any good reason why we wouldn't want to make it harder for criminals and those with several mental illness to buy a gun," Obama said.

"There were no coherent arguments as to why we wouldn't do this."

Obama vowed that the vote would not end his fight for stricter gun laws and was "just round one." But it's unclear where the White House and its allies on guns can go from here, after the Senate sunk their best hope.

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With five Democrats voting along with 41 Republicans against the measure, Obama didn't spare his own party the blame. He said opponents made a political calculation that the gun lobby and a vocal minority of gun owners would come after them in the next election.

"Obviously a lot of Republicans had that fear, but Democrats had that fear, too," Obama said. "And so they caved to the pressure and started looking for an excuse, any excuse, to vote no."
The pointed accusations were a marked departure from Obama's "no drama" style. He's shown a lot of passion on the gun issue, even publicly shedding tears, but his emotion was previously appeared more rooted in sadness than anger.

He made persistent calls over the past few months for senators simply to allow a vote to honor the 26 victims from Sandy Hook Elementary School and those killed in other mass shootings. After that vote, he appeared before cameras flanked relatives of five children killed at Sandy Hook along with former Rep. Gabby Giffords, shot in the head two years ago while meeting with her Arizona constituents.

Mark Barden, whose lost his 7-year-old son, Daniel, introduced the president and said the families would return home "disappointed but not defeated."

"Our hearts are broken," Barden said, as Obama put his hand on his shoulder. Some of the parents cried and were embraced by Biden, Obama's point man on the issue.

Obama said of the families: "I still don't know how they have been able to muster up the strength to do what they've been doing over the last several weeks, the last several months. And I see this as just round one."

A senior Obama adviser, speaking on a condition of anonymity to discuss strategy for the issue, said the White House always knew that strengthening gun laws would be difficult and probably have less than a 50-50 chance of passing. But the president was deeply moved by the Sandy Hook shooting Dec. 14 and thought it was worth the effort since it hadn't been tried in over a decade, the adviser said.

The White House strategy was to move quickly, with Obama announcing his proposals just a month after Sandy Hook; have Biden stay on top of the issue with frequent appearances to key constituencies; and use the president to lift the debate up nationally at key moments by appearing with a broad range of groups including law enforcement, western voters and the victims' families. Obama purposefully stayed out of the bill's drafting in a recognition that he wasn't going to help by trying to insert himself in the legislative process.

The adviser said they never believed that senators would act because Obama asked them to, but the question was whether public outrage over Sandy Hook would be enough to move them. So Obama put the families out in front - appearing with them to give impassioned speeches, calling them out in an emotional conclusion to his State of the Union address, ferrying them aboard Air Force One to Washington for a lobbying campaign and turning over his weekly radio address to a grieving mother.

The frequent appearances led Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., to accuse Obama of using them "as props, and politicizing people's tragedy."

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Obama lambasted the suggestion. "Do we really think thousands of families whose lives have been shattered by gun violence don't have a right to weigh in on this issue? Do we think their emotions, their loss is not relevant to this debate? So all in all this was a pretty shameful day for Washington."
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GOPUSA Editor's Note: Baucus, Begich, Heitkamp and Pryor were the Democrats who voted against gun control. Republicans Collins, Kirk and McCain voted FOR gun control. Reid also voted against it but that was only a procedural vote so that he can bring the bill up again should he choose to do so.

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http://www.gopusa.com/news/2013/04/1.../?subscriber=1

FBI Data Shows Criminals Won’t Be Caught In Gun Grab Dragnet

April 18, 2013 by Ben Bullard

http://personallibertycom.files.word...0&h=300&crop=1PHOTOS.COM

How many bad guys do you think try to buy guns from licensed dealers, the retailers whom Congress wants to slap with further restrictions on instant verifications for gun sales? How many criminals are getting access to their guns via “traditional,” on-the-grid avenues, initiating transactions that route them through background checks designed to ensure those very creeps aren’t the ones who can get their hands on firearms?

One-fourth? Ten percent? Five?

Try less than 1 percent. In fact, it’s less than half of 1 percent. Since 1998, there have been 590,070 attempts by convicts — guilty of both felonies and misdemeanors — to buy firearms from gun dealers who must check their criminal past on the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check (NICS) system. That’s out a total of 167,488,942 background checks done on all gun sales for the same period.

Both sets of figures come straight from the FBI. Hat tip to CNS News for doing a little arithmetic: Those 590,070 convicts who tried to buy a gun through legitimate means represent a mere .35 percent of all gun-buy attempts over the past 14 years.

Senate Democrats busied themselves Wednesday trying to scrounge up enough votes to move ahead with an amendment to the laughably-titled Public Safety and Second Amendment Rights Protection Act, one that would close the so-called “gun show loophole” by mandating background checks on firearms transactions between private individuals.

They lost, with the amendment failing to pass in a 54-46 vote. Without the amendment’s approval, the whole Act’s chances of making it through the early days of the Democrat-controlled 113^th Congress likely will be sunk.

Complicating matters more for supporters of the Gun Grab Act was the introduction of an “alternative” gun control bill Wednesday by Senators Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas). That bill may have its critics, once pundits from the right and left have a chance to pore through its language; but a rundown of the bill’s highlights indicates, at least in spirit, a piece of legislation written with the understanding that criminals, by definition, can’t be touched by draconian gun laws that serve only to restrict the rights of law-abiding citizens.

Highlights of the Grassley-Cruz bill include:

• No expansion of the existing NICS background check system.
• Creating a task force to prosecute those who fail criminal background checks when attempting to buy guns.
• Requiring the U.S. Department of Justice to report to Congress periodically on its prosecution of those who attempt to buy guns illegally.
• Making third-party “straw purchase” trafficking illegal.

For the most part, the bill looks, at first glance, to target government and law enforcement agencies already tasked with enforcing existing laws instead of going after individual citizens with expanded Federal restrictions. Cruz couched the bill just so at a Wednesday morning press conference:

Rather than restricting the rights of law-abiding Americans, we should be focusing on keeping guns out of the hands of violent criminals, which this legislation accomplishes. While the Obama Administration continues to politicize a terrible tragedy to push its anti-gun agenda, I am proud to stand beside my fellow senators to present common-sense measures that will increase criminal prosecutions of felons who try to buy guns, criminalize straw purchasing and gun trafficking, and address mental health issues.

Sounds fair. But these bills have a way of coming out of committee — if they get off the ground at all — looking far different than they did going in, and Cruz may yet be criticized for introducing any “alternative” that even smells like gun control — regardless of its publicity value — when simple opposition to the Public Safety and Second Amendment Rights Protection Act would have served the original 2^nd Amendment very well.

The Grassley-Cruz amendment was up for a Senate vote late Wednesday, so stay tuned.

UPDATE: The Senate defeated the Grassley-Cruz amendment in a 52-48 vote late Wednesday, as well as a ban on “straw trafficking” by a 58-42 margin.

Filed Under: 2nd Amendment Under Fire, Conservative Politics, Liberty News, Staff Reports


http://personalliberty.com/2013/04/1...-grab-dragnet/

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A TALE OF TWO PRESS CONFERENCES

Question: Why is President Barack Obama so much angrier and more animated about losing a Senate vote on Gun Control than about somebody bombing the Boston Marathon?

http://dailycaller.com/2013/04/17/a-...#ixzz2Qm9GsRtf

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