Barack "laser eyes" Obama & Gabb "vacant gaze" Giffords.

So awful. Thanks for posting about this today. The Guardian's all-day coverage concluded with this:

The Democratic leadership may have to pull gun control from the legislative agenda for the time being. But they, along with President Obama and gun control campaigners and pressure groups, will now attempt to wield this failure as a cudgel against incumbent, no-voting senators through the next election, hoping to bring about a more favorable climate in 2015.

We'll see.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr…

You know, if WA, OR, and CA split into 12 states, so that 90 percent of the population did not have 10 senators, this would not be a problem.

Time for Seattle to be a state. And Puerto Rico and DC.

@3, hey genius: if Seattle was a state, we'd still have the two D senators we have now, but the rest of Washington would be R. You'd increase the number of Rs, not the number of Ds.

You are truly a shithead of epic proportions.

@1 this may be a new low for you and that's really saying something. You are one sick fuck.

@3
How many states will Texas become on your new map?
Will Walla Walla and Spokane get a state each or share one?

I call a shameful day in Washington: Wednesday. As Jon Stewart said last night the Federal government has given up on governing.

@6 Texas would probably be 5 states, 3 of them blue.

Last time I checked, most of King County other than Seattle and Snohomish County were blue, so you'd end with 4 blue senators and 2 red in WA, 2 blue and 2 red in OR, and CA would be even bluer.

God, Obama looked like he'd been kicked in the teeth during that presser.

It really warmed the cockles of my heart.

@1--You really are a miserable piece of shit, aren't you?

@7 Do we really want people who have "difficulty formulating coherent thoughts" formulating policy that tampers with the Constitution.

@5 For what it's worth, she looks less confused at being there than crazy uncle Joe...

The fun part is the red districts still don't get that most of the impact of sequestration is happening to them. It's like those ads for 4WDs that show someone headed to the country with the big city in the background - most wannabe's who are gun nuts are not hunters, just like most people who buy 4WDs don't actually use them for stuff that needs a 4WD. Probably no idea how to use a winch either.

@13
Wenches should be used roughly, often and shared liberally. Or so I'm told.

And tell me again how background checks would have made a pin of difference at Sandy Hook?

@14
I thought Cheney was really in charge for those 8 years...?

Yes the bells of freedom sound an awful lot like the clack of a six-year-old's teeth against the barrel of a free man's firearm.

@12 - You realize she resigned, right? ("Resigned" means she doesn't write laws in Congress any more).

Loved seeing Obama pissed off. "This is round one".

5280 - your happiness over lack of basic background checks duly noted. You ARE fixated on this one issue. Interesting.

Yep. If this is round one, bring on round two.

It's not just the background check bill that crashed and burned today. I think there were eight other gun control bills that also went down in flames.

Yeah, I'm happy about that.

@#10 it warmed the cockles of your what now? If you fking had a heart, you'd have no idea what it was for.

Old Choom Obongo took it in the ass.

The only thing that might, just might make just some, just SOME of those NRA nuts shut up (just a little) is if a room full of pregnant women get shot up. Cause the bible thumpers who also think Jesus loves their guns too (he's probably coming back with a in their head) wouldn't know what to do with that.

Oh, and for the couple of shit head comments that basically ask how the laws would have helped at Sandy Hook - have you noticed how no one is saying now: Bombs don't kill people... people do! Where's that rhetoric? WHy don't we all get together and make a pressure cooker bomb for every person in the country. We all get one!!! Because there's no danger right? As long as everyone doesn't misuse it and takes proper care of it... I mean, what would be the problem? Sure, they are illegal... but how about we make them legal, make everybody 1 bomb and then if any bomb goes off, killing people and maiming others including kids we'll all get together, hold hands and joyfully repeat: BOMBS DON'T KILL PEOPLE! PEOPLE DO. Here's the thing: Less people were killed yesterday than at most major school shootings. Many more were injured and many more may die in Boston. So that statement may become untrue. Still, for right now... chew on that.

ok. Sorry. I just hate that shit. So Stupid.

I apologize for my grammar and spelling in the above comment. Massive fail. :)

@27 - Also, in the panic, that college student might have been shot rather than just tackled. Expecting everyone to be level-headed and rational is stupid.

@20
I have nothing to be gained by background checks.
In fact, I might even think them a good idea.
But the reality is that NO back ground check would have prevented Sandy Hook or any other school shooting. The come across as nothing more than feel good well we did something.

@31: haha like the US would know what it feels like to do something. And like policy just STOPS once a law is passed.

@11, pre-election he was on here under the moniker "GayforRomney" making ridiculous astroturfer arguments. It was pretty obvious there were checks from Karl Rove's Strangeways PAC in return. Post-election, he's back to the old moniker and pretending not to have been gay for Mittens.

Yes it is so shameful that the senate didn't push through a bill that hadn't been read at the request of the president who has routinely violated provisions of the US Constitutions.

Has anyone here read the bill?

My guess would be that the answer is "No."

@34: we're all not unemployed like you, so we rely on our elected representatives to do things like read legislation.

name me a president that hasn't "routinely violated provisions of the US Constitutions". its a matter of degree.

obama knew this was coming the day those little kids got shot. i'm surprised he can even feign surprise. the legislative branch has utterly ceased to function.

There's nothing unconstitutional about a little (and I mean little) regulation.

Editors, will it ever be prudent to ban the most vile of commenters? Please?

@35

So violating the oath of office is OK as long as everyone does it, those are some pretty low standards.

You just made me wish I was unemployed. I would have like 50+ more hours a week to do things like go skiing, climb mountains, ride my bike and work on my marksmanship. Plus I could finally get something from those social programs that 25% of my income is stolen to support.

@32
I may be dense, but I have no idea what your point is.
Could you perhaps clarify in a non- ironic way?

Hey Obama,

You know what was an even more shameful day?

Monday.

No, not because of the Boston Marathon bombings. Jackass. But because YOU signed a bill that decimated the STOCK Act.

Gun control matters less than cleaning up government. At least to some of us. By having a corrupt as fuck government, we allow ourselves to suffer. And, by signing this bill, Obama, you have endorsed a corrupt government. By signing this bill, you acknowledge that you celebration of the STOCK Act was a show to get re-elected.

Yes, Monday was a shameful day in our government. And you should be ashamed.

Signed,
The American Public

Remember, guns don't kill small children in mass quantities.

Gun nuts with fast-loading automatic weapons with large capacity magazines hopped up on crazy kill small children in mass quantities.

Most guns just sit there on the shelf or mantlepiece or gun rack, waiting for your grandkids to take them down and blow their brains out, just like they see on TV.

@34, 37 - I'm sorry about your penis.

At no point in this thread, or at anytime in this years gun control debate, has anyone explained how any proposed law would've prevented Newtown.

Background checks wouldn't have changed a goddamn thing.

You know what that makes this whole exercise?

Nothing but feelgood bullshit and masturbatory political kabuki. That's it. No more, no less.

@42, it's funny that all you can think about is penises. I guess we don't need to take anything you say seriously.

What this requires is for gun control advocates to go "Willie Horton" here.

This means running ads against every senator who voted to filibuster talking about how they voted to arm felons and dangerous lunatics with guns. How they voted on the side of James Holmes and Adam Lanza and against first graders. Tie the senators to the lunatics, just as the GOP tied Willie Horton to Michael Dukakis.

And every time there's a news report on the local news that talks about someone getting shot, there needs to be an ad following that report saying that Senator X voted to arm criminals.

If I had unlimited funds, I'd even run ads against the NRA and Wayne LaPierre. Make it so that they cannot possibly even get invited on to news and opinion shows.

Yeah, they'll cry foul. And it is foul and underhanded. But we've reached the point where those are the only tactics that work. If 90% support for a bill isn't enough to get it through the Senate, then clearly stronger measures are warranted.

Hell, in southern states, if I were running the campaign, I'd go full on Lee Atwater/Jesse Helms. Run with the whole "soft on crime" thing from the '80s and '90s. Run with the racial overtones, casting the gun lobby and their tame politicians as the friends of the scary black criminals who use guns to rape white women. And run with graphic pictures of the carnage in Newtown. Corpses of little kids, lying in pools of blood, with the politician's name and face attached to it, saying "this is what Senator X is voting for".

These guys want to play hardball. Give 'em hardball.

And yeah, I can already hear the whining and handwringing over these kinds of tactics. That's why liberals don't win elections.

If you really want to win on this issue, this is what it's going to take. The alternative is to learn to live with the status quo (and maybe that's what you prefer...you do need to pick your priorities).

The NRA has just demonstrated that it can and will prevent any and all gun control, even in the wake of little kids getting shot. You need to nuke 'em from orbit if you want to win.

I wonder if a member al Queda walked into a preschool with a automatic rifle bought at a gun show blasted 30 or so 4 year olds away THEN could we have some sort of gun control (assuming they were all white kids...we apparently don't care about anyone non-white)

Or if Congress doesn't see this as a problem, let's remove the Capital Hill Police from their beat?

Duh, it never did have 90% support, dumbass. That was just bullshit perpetrated by the liberal media. God, you guys are even dumber than I think sometimes.

@45 - When do you take anything seriously outside of your love for guns?

@46 & 47 - AMEN, Corydon.

@49

"American voters say 48 - 38 percent that the government could use the information from universal background checks to confiscate legally-owned guns, but voters still support universal gun background checks 91 - 8 percent, including 88 - 11 percent among voters in households with guns, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today."

I'm a former infantryman. I'm comfortable handling weapons. I support the second amendment. But allowing convicted felons and dangerously insane people access to firearms is just stupid.

@46

But then wouldn't we need guns to protect ourselves from all the armed criminals?

Also the closeted racism inherent to liberal thought is showing in 47.

Good to see you support misinformation and outright lies, it really clears up who we are dealing with when it comes to gun control supporters.

@53, It's not closeted racism. Although I'll grant you it assumes a certain racism on the part of conservatives (an assumption I think is pretty justified, but whatever).

What it is is playing on the racism of the electorate. That's not racist in and of itself (although it does perpetuate racist ideas). It's using already-existing racism in order to achieve a political goal.

This is precisely what Atwater and Helms and many other conservatives (who may or may not have been racists themselves) did for years and years and years.

It's a political tactic.

@54

Oh so it is not racism, it is just fanning the fire of preexisting racism.

Totally a step towards equality, you must be so proud of yourself.

You Fucking racist.

@56

5280 isn't mad, he is just sipping on whiskey mixed with a generous amount of liberal tears.

@55 You can call me names all you want. I'm tough, I can take it.

As I stated above, you have to pick your priorities. My analysis is that passing background checks (which in the realm of gun control legislation is pretty weak sauce) cannot happen at the federal level due to the outsize influence of conservatives in GOP primaries and interest groups like the NRA.

We have had what I would have thought was pretty overwhelming evidence that giving lunatics access to firearms was a really dumb idea. And we saw (read the link in my previous post 52) that an overwhelming majority of voters agree with that position. It's the kind of massive majority that doesn't exist on any other issue.

But that was not enough to get past a filibuster.

So that tells me you have to go directly after the people the filibustering senators fear. Those senators must be made to fear background check advocates more. And dead children were insufficient to do that. Which tells me that you have to go all in.

If you have any other viable suggestions, I'm all ears. But I doubt they exist.

You are correct that the tactics I prescribe do perpetuate racism. My response is that you must choose your priorities. Is it more important to you to get background checks or to avoid any taint of racism. You place a higher premium on the latter. That's admirable. Most people posting here apparently place a higher premium on the former (maybe because they think reducing black casualties of gun violence at the hands of felons handed guns is more important that general societal racism, but there might be other reasons too, including, I grant you, that some gun control advocates are also racist).

If background checks is the higher priority, then I believe my prescription is the only one that will work. If combating racism in all its forms is the higher priority, then, as I said above, you need to get used to living with armed felons and lunatics.

Pridge Wessea is cute!!!

@46
@47
So you propose running an aggressive campgne against the re-election of the 5 Democratic Senators who voted no? Cool! I believe their all up for re-election soon (and most of them serve states that Obama could not carry). I say go scorched earth on their asses!!!

I am very interested in understanding why Cascadian Bacon thinks felons and the mentally ill should be able to buy guns without a background check.

@63 - Because to gun nuts, the second amendment is holy and guns are their sacrament. They demand everyone be blessed like they are, it's the only way for us to be collectively safer.

They bleat in the same way that others do about religious freedom - just enough for them, but way too much for you - and want special protections because they worship firearms. Of course it's all bullshit, but most religion is.

Sorry, that should be @62.

Proud of the President.
Time to make those folk who voted against it pay.

I am so proud of our President. He has proven time and time again that he is our champion and not a puppet of the machine. He won't give up on doing what's right and he won't be cajoled into compromising his principles. I will stand beside him and keep fighting because lord knows I shouldn't be allowed to have a gun in my house.

@20

"The right to have and bear arms SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED UPON." What part of that sentence in English difficult for you to understand. There's only one word with more than one syllable for goodness sake! (There are online dictionaries for the word infringed, fyi. But Blacks Law is a better source, since the word has a legal meaning here rather than a merely lingual one. You'll probably also need help with words like 'have' and 'be' as well, so start there is my advice.

So here's the contrast- One gauranteed civil right enumerated in the Constitution versus a police state deciding for me what tools I need in my house on the grounds of what trash like you and the lib legislators and your president feel like the Constitution might mean, maybe, if they really really want it to mean that. Pretty easy if you ask me....

This is a good day for civil liberty in America. And about damn time too.

Oh, and thanks Slog staff for the picture of angry Obama. Anytime that America hating braying jackass is mad is a good day for this country.

@64

A lot of people who hated this stupid new attempt at law hated it for other reasons.

For instance- I don't own a gun, nor do I have any plans to buy one. It's a tool I simply don't need. But if the rights in the 2nd Amendment are so much wind, so are those in the rest of the Constitution. It's called precedent, or the common law system. Today gun rights, tomorrow free speech (or what's left of it,) criminal rights or what's left of them and so on.

Additionally, at no point has anyone shown a tiny fragment of reason to believe that a new intrusion into personal liberty would have the slightest effect on gun violence. Washinton DC and Chicago have spearheaded attacks on 2nd Amendment rights of breathtaking audacity, and yet violence by gun is unchanged or up in both cities. The single thing the threat of new guns did was cause a mass rush to buy the very guns you idiots think are causing the problems.

As to your bigotry about religion, I need hardly note that most of the seminal thinkers in science and the arts and language (Divine Comedy, Sistine Chapel or any of the great universisties, mostly founded by religous orders ring a bell, moron?) have come from institutions of religion.

You're very welcome. Have a nice day.

@Seattleblues: Apparently "well-regulated" has far too many syllables for you to comprehend, so you just skipped over it.

@71

A well regulated militia, not a well regulated individual. That had more to do with the not yet settled issue of whether the federal or state governments had primacy. It would take several strong presidents, national crisis situations and the 14th Amendment to settle that question inasmuch as it has been settled.

As the Supreme Court held a few years ago, the right to bear arms is one conferred on individuals, not the militia per se.

Seattleblues, you're just another softie on crime who believes that that convicted felons should be able to buy guns.

@73

Not really. There are good legal reasons why courts have upheld such restrictions. I don't actually mind the idea of background checks in principle. Set aside the 2nd Amendment for a moment though and ask yourself how many homocides were prevented by background checks. How many felons thought 'wait a minute I don't have a right to carry a gun anymore!'

I mean, it isn't as if people whose driving licenses were suspended usually stop driving, or people like Holden whose brains have long since turned to VD ridden slop stop writing.

So why bother suspending licenses? Why bother preventing felons from gun ownership? Obviously, criminals aren't deterred by laws against crime, so we shouldn't have any.

Even leaving aside the carnage resulting from gun accidents and suicides, your reasoning, if it can be called that, is breathtakingly vapid.

@Seattleblues, I love this:

I don't actually mind the idea of background checks in principle.

But apparently, when it's actually proposed by our President ("that America hating braying jackass"), it's:

a police state deciding for me what tools I need in my house on the grounds of what trash like you and the lib legislators and your president feel like the Constitution might mean

and

this stupid new attempt at law

and

a new intrusion into personal liberty

When defeated, it's "a good day for civil liberty in America."

Sheesh, check your meds.

@76

Sorry, subtleties appear to be beyond you...

There are all kinds of things I'd like to see done in the US. Deporting Savage to somewhere that thinks his brand of vulgar dismantling of the social contract and attacks on everything that raises us above the level of a Chimp to Belarus or Croatia for example is something I could really get behind. But as loathesome as that thing called Savage is, it
still is an American citizen, so I wouldn't. Disgusting as he and everything about him are, I would fight for his rights as stringently as for a decent person.

Similarly, I don't think anyone needs a so called assault weapon. They aren't useful in any usual context of gun ownership. I don't however see one damned thing in the Constitution that allows their ban.

The point, as always, stays uncontested. The defeated law would have given government far more power than any rational person would wish for it to have. As compellingly, it would not have saved one single life, or at least I've never heard anyone show me how it would.

You can mandate background checks on all gun sales, private or business, and it won't work. First, the ATF and other law enforcement simply hasn't the manpower to police the private gun sales market. (Even if they did, is such an over-policed society really where you want to live?) Second, no evidence exists that such checks stop homocide by gun, or even alter the numbers meaningfully.

My gun nut co-workers are delighted. I wonder what the hell they can say about their Sandy Hook false flag conspiracy theories now. An all-powerful new world order is no match against the NRA? Wha?

Fuckers. Screw it, let's let red America secede. Next time I find myself in a debate with one of these bastards I think I'm going to scream and it's not just going to be a debate

Before you turn it into "not just a debate," you might want to think about the fact that we're usually armed.

As to your bigotry about religion, I need hardly note that most of the seminal thinkers in science and the arts and language (Divine Comedy, Sistine Chapel or any of the great universisties, mostly founded by religous orders ring a bell, moron?) have come from institutions of religion.

If you actually cared about the statistics on science, the arts, and language, you'd also note that the majority of the great advances therein have also historically been made, at levels disproportionate to their representation in the population at large, by homosexuals.