Guns, Democrats, and My Hometown (one last time)
(First off, apologies for the multiple posting attempts. This is my first time posting here, and I needed some help to figure this out!)
You know how lousy it feels to be sold down the river by congressional Democrats who you thought had your back? Now imagine there was nothing you could do about it.
On Thursday, about 50 House Democrats introduced H.R. 6691 to repeal DC's rules requiring registration of handguns and prohibiting bringing in guns from neighboring Virginia or Maryland. Why are they all so keen on rewriting my hometown's gun laws? Because, according to The Hill, the NRA has been going around threatening Blue Dog Democrats that they'll be stripped of their "A-plus" rating if they don't come aboard.
But surely the House leadership won't be bullied into bringing such a bill to the floor! Err. Again, via the Hill: "House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she personally opposes a bill loosening the District of Columbia's gun laws, but that does not mean she will block it from coming to the floor. 'I want to see the particulars,' Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday. 'Then we'll see what comes to the floor or doesn't come to the floor.'"
I know most of you know this already, but DC's 588,000 residents - compare to Wyoming's 515,000 - have no voting rights in either the House or the Senate. DC's population is majority African-American and overwhelmingly Democratic, so although we pay taxes and die in wars, we're not getting two Senators any time soon. (Can you imagine that, by the way? Instead of only three black Senators since Reconstruction, we would likely have two black Senators every term out of DC. Any I'm not going to lie, we'd probably be so pissed at the rest of you we'd elect Marion Barry to both of them.)
Instead, we get people like Reps. Travis Childers (D-Miss.), Jason Altmire (D-Pa.), and Don Cazayoux (D-La.), the three lead sponsors on H.R. 6691, sitting down with the NRA to write our city's gun laws! With all do respect, DC is not Lawrence County, PA, it's not St. Helena Parish, LA, and it's definitely not Tupelo, MS. I'd like those Representatives to come live a week in Trinidad - a neighborhood in NE where things have gotten so rough our cops' best idea for keeping the peace is military-style checkpoints - and see if they still feel the same way about gun control. But until they really come out and see what it's like, rewriting our laws to score points with the NRA is just wrong.
You know how lousy it feels to be sold down the river by congressional Democrats who you thought had your back? Now imagine there was nothing you could do about it.
On Thursday, about 50 House Democrats introduced H.R. 6691 to repeal DC's rules requiring registration of handguns and prohibiting bringing in guns from neighboring Virginia or Maryland. Why are they all so keen on rewriting my hometown's gun laws? Because, according to The Hill, the NRA has been going around threatening Blue Dog Democrats that they'll be stripped of their "A-plus" rating if they don't come aboard.
But surely the House leadership won't be bullied into bringing such a bill to the floor! Err. Again, via the Hill: "House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she personally opposes a bill loosening the District of Columbia's gun laws, but that does not mean she will block it from coming to the floor. 'I want to see the particulars,' Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday. 'Then we'll see what comes to the floor or doesn't come to the floor.'"
I know most of you know this already, but DC's 588,000 residents - compare to Wyoming's 515,000 - have no voting rights in either the House or the Senate. DC's population is majority African-American and overwhelmingly Democratic, so although we pay taxes and die in wars, we're not getting two Senators any time soon. (Can you imagine that, by the way? Instead of only three black Senators since Reconstruction, we would likely have two black Senators every term out of DC. Any I'm not going to lie, we'd probably be so pissed at the rest of you we'd elect Marion Barry to both of them.)
Instead, we get people like Reps. Travis Childers (D-Miss.), Jason Altmire (D-Pa.), and Don Cazayoux (D-La.), the three lead sponsors on H.R. 6691, sitting down with the NRA to write our city's gun laws! With all do respect, DC is not Lawrence County, PA, it's not St. Helena Parish, LA, and it's definitely not Tupelo, MS. I'd like those Representatives to come live a week in Trinidad - a neighborhood in NE where things have gotten so rough our cops' best idea for keeping the peace is military-style checkpoints - and see if they still feel the same way about gun control. But until they really come out and see what it's like, rewriting our laws to score points with the NRA is just wrong.
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