A Question For @SenToomey

Here's Pat Toomey's statement on why he threw his hat in the ring with noted second amendment stalwarts like Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin on the Orwellian-sounding "Public Safety And Second Amendment Rights Protection Act":

Pennsylvania has a long, bipartisan tradition of supporting gun rights. I am a proud part of that tradition. I am a gun owner. I revere the rights enshrined in our Second Amendment. My record shows this.

Criminal background checks are just common sense. If you pass a criminal background check, you can buy a gun. It's the people who fail a criminal or mental health background check that we don't want having guns.

That can be done without infringing on law-abiding people's gun rights. And we ought to do it. (emphasis added)

Oh, really?

Seung-Hui Cho passed a background check before killing 32 people and wounding 17 at Virginia Tech.

Jared Loughner passed a background check before killing 6 people and wounding 13 in Tucson.

James Holmes passed a background check before killing 12 people and injuring 58 in Aurora.

Adam Lanza ... well, he murdered his mother before killing 26 other people with guns stolen from her. Lanza's mother, of course, passed a background check.

So, Senator Toomey, explain to me how this legislation actually works to improve public safety or "prevent the next Newtown" again. Oh, right, it doesn't ... and you know that. But, by gum, you "did something" you can put on your campaign ads in 2016, didn't you?

More from Charles C. W. Cooke: Toomey and Manchin’s Slippery Slope

All in all, let’s admit that, in and of itself, this bill is not the end of the world.

Does this mean that you should shrug your shoulders nonchalantly and turn to other things? Should you stay at home? Should we presume that qui tacet consentire videtur?

Not on your life.

Alas, there is peril ahead. Why? Because today’s “exemption” is tomorrow’s “loophole.” No sooner will the glorious presidential ink have dried on that abject page, than those provisions that were sold a few days earlier as commonsense exemptions — the product of “bipartisan compromise” and other media-tested platitudes — will become structural problems, ripe for “standardizing.”

Remember, Pennsylvania ... Pat Toomey didn't actually load the soldiers into the trojan horse. He just built it.

posted by Andy at 01:30 PM

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