…or to be more precise, against a hurricane. First, we have this situation:
The trifecta of coronavirus fears, George Floyd protests, and the push to defund the police has resulted in surging gun sales in Minnesota.
…
The number of background checks conducted in Minnesota in March represented a 20-year high.
Then came the May 25 death of George Floyd and the subsequent riots, after which Frontiersman Sports owner Kory Krouse said the demand for guns went through the roof.
Krouse said, “People are really scared coming in here. We had a three, four hour wait just to get up to the counter during the height of … the rioting.”
As a result of the surge, gun store inventories are down and ammunition is scarce.
So one would think that a savvy politician would read the tea leaves (or, the actual statistics), and say, “Hmmm… this is probably not the right time to be pushing for gun control.”
Step forward, Minneso-duh! senator Tina Smith:
Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) is pushing an “assault weapons” ban, a “high capacity” magazine ban, and an expansion of background checks that would outlaw private gun sales.
According to her campaign website, Smith cosponsored the “Assault Weapons Ban of 2019,” which would have banned 205 commonly-owned semiautomatic firearms and all ammunition magazines holding more than ten rounds.
Smith also cosponsored the Background Check Expansion Act (BCEA). The BCEA was a push to expand retail background checks to private sales as well. In doing that, BCEA would have criminalized private sales, making it illegal for a neighbor to sell a five-shot revolver to a lifelong neighbor without first finding a Federal Firearms License holder and having a background check performed.
You have to be in the grip of a special kind of stupid to do this kind of thing in the current circumstances. But that’s the deal with doctrinaire Socialists: it’s all about the intentions, never about the outcomes and consequences. And never mind what the proles think: the Party is always right, comrades.
Even when they’re horribly, hopelessly wrong.
“Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) is pushing an “assault weapons” ban…”
========
A direct violation of the highest law in all the land.
She should immediately be arrested and brought up on charges of that law violation.
Are there just not enough righteous, gun-toting Minnesotans to “kick her ass to the curb” in the next election?
I think there will be once they discover how many unenforced “Commonsense Gun Laws” there are, already on the books, that they are in favor of that are all ready to be enforced against THEM.
Especially once they realize that there are fewer restrictions on their underage daughter getting an abortion than if they wanted to buy a pistol.
That’s the problem with electing a parrot to Congress
I take comfort in thinking that a majority are first-time gun buyers learning all about those “commonsense gun laws” that long-time gun owners been howling about for years.
Yes. Once they buy guns, they know that buying a book is simpler, in spite of the big lie Saint Barak said.
Minnesota may not be as famously leftist as California or Massachusetts, but our politicians are every bit as crazy. Minnesota doesn’t actually have a Democratic party. We have the DFL party which was formed as a merger between the Democratic party and the Farmer-Labor party. The Farmer-Labor party was a hard left socialist party that was itself a coalition between Iron Mining unions and Prairie Populist style rural socialists. That means that most Minnesotans were raised with the unexamined assumption that conservatives and Republicans are automatically the bad guys.
With that social inertia for a background the two most prominent politicians in Minnesota are Keith Ellison and Ilhan Omar, two odious demagogues who are about as far left as they come. Tina Smith is a more traditional corrupt party operative who consolidated her power within the party by running the administration of dysfunctional alcoholic Governor Mark Dayton, for whom she was nominally the Lieutenant Governor.
I’ve lived in this state most of my life, but even I can’t figure out how the DFL party stays so successful. The only real hope is that the northern part of the state, where iron mining is still a thing is much more conservative than the party of their fathers and grandfathers and they may be starting to understand that.
Imagine the screaming if the Democrat Farm Labor party has a large number of defections to the Republican Party. If only that screaming translated into effective major Apoplexy in major party leaders.