Faced with a Collapse of America's Health Care System, Chuck Schumer Secretly Pushes for... Gun Control

Guest post by Gun Owners of America

Urgent alert: Gun vote could come as soon as Monday in the House.

Washington, DC - With 80,000,000 Americans poised to lose their employer-provided insurance plans, what would you think the Senate’s number three Democrat, Chuck Schumer, is now poised to cram down Republicans’ quivering throats?

ANSWER: More gun control.

Senator Schumer already tried to sneak a gun control bill through the Senate on November 21 — right before Thanksgiving — and according to one congressman, the House could use a parliamentary procedure to pass it as early as today (Monday).

But let’s take a step back to explain.

Earlier this year, Schumer threatened that, if he did not get his way — destroying the “gun manufacturers’ lobby” in the process — your children would be killed. We actually received anonymous faxes and e-mails from Schumer’s allies, telling us that our children should have been killed at Newtown.

Now Schumer is threatening that, if he cannot pass gun control, your plane will be hijacked. Schumer’s new threat is similarly odious and baseless.

At issue is the reauthorization of the 1988 Plastic Gun Ban.

Crammed through in 1988 by a newly Democratic Senate looking for guns to ban, it was passed at a time when there was no actual problem.

Having said that, the poorly drafted law has always been an anti-gun time bomb, waiting to explode in the hands of an anti-gun president — which we now have.

If, after removing grips, stocks, and magazines, any gun is not as “detectable” by a metal detector as is a “Security Exemplar,” the gun is banned — permanently.

Within certain broad parameters concerning metallic standards, anti-gun Attorney General Eric Holder gets to determine the exact shape and characteristics of the Exemplar, what metal detector is used, and how many times (or how many thousands of times) the gun has to pass.

Also, if any major component of the gun — which the statute tries to define, but may ultimately be defined by Holder — doesn’t produce an accurate x-ray image (again, defined by Holder), the gun is banned.

All of this would be just a theoretical problem if we didn’t have a president and an Attorney General who were willing to go to any length -- including actually violating the law -- in order to destroy the Second Amendment.

So where are we now? And why should Congress think long and hard about giving into the demands of a ruthless partisan who is denying votes on the things Americans desperately care about?

FIRST, Schumer and his allies have engaged in a concerted effort to use a plastic gun ban reauthorization to ban much of America’s firearms manufacturing. Drafts which they have pushed all year would ban a printer, mold, or program which could conceivably be used to make a plastic gun. The problem is that any such printer, mold, or program would also ban technology and molds used by many firearms manufacturers to make widely used metal guns. As with gun control proposals earlier this year, Schumer is trying to use hysterics to pass proposals inimical to the Second Amendment. He should not be allowed to do so.

What this means is that the Undetectable Firearms Act, which was passed in 1988 in response to no particular threat — and has been useless during its 25 years of existence — is now being used as a platform for calling for more gun control.

SECOND, it is simply not true that, failing reauthorization, killers could “carry plastic guns into schools, courthouses, and airplanes.” All of these are illegal [18 U.S.C. 922(q) and 930], and will remain illegal. Further, reauthorization is not going to make it practically more difficult to get a plastic gun, as the program is already out there, and the genie is effectively out of the bottle.

Why would an Adam Lanza, going into a public venue to engage in mass shootings, decide that a plastic gun ban was the one law he had to obey?

THIRD, Republicans need to begin punishing Reid and Schumer for last month’s “nuclear option” — which effectively destroyed the Senate as an institution. Republicans have talked about retaliation, so would they give in to the first anti-gun demand Schumer makes?

FOURTH, Schumer attempted to slam through his gun manufacturing ban without a vote (i.e., by unanimous consent) and without notifying Republicans of his intentions through a telephone notification procedure called “hot-lining.” As of the end of November — more than a week after Schumer tried to pass the gun ban – we still didn’t have the language of the bill Schumer tried to pass the previous week by unanimous consent.

Have we learned nothing from ObamaCare? If slime and corruption are rewarded, there will be even more of it.

FIFTH, Schumer wants to ban guns. Okay, we all understand that. But the GOP also has a “wish list” which has been stifled — and denied a vote – by the dictatorial tactics of Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer. For instance, Senate Republicans have pushed to restore the constitutional rights of more than 150,000 veterans who were stripped of all due process and had their guns taken away. Republicans want to postpone or repeal the individual mandate on the anti-gun ObamaCare program, which everyone now realizes was passed on the basis of a pile of lies, and which now threatens to strip 80,000,000 Americans of their employer-provided policies. Republicans want the gun reciprocity bill, supported by a bipartisan majority of the Senate, despite Harry Reid’s efforts to bury it. Are any of these less important than Schumer’s slobbering demands for more gun control? If not, why should Schumer’s bill move without one or more of these amendments added to it?

SIXTH, with only about seven legislative days left in the first session, it’s a little late to be diving into the thorny subject of regulating printers and the Internet.

So please, let’s not let congressional Republicans give Schumer the satisfaction of passing gun control — and “bashing the gun lobby.” Ultimately, victory feeds on itself. And defeat feeds on itself. And, if Republicans gratuitously give the anti-gun Far Left a victory without firing a shot, they will have only succeeded in bringing to life a gun control movement which has, as a chief objective, the destruction of the Republican Party.

ACTION: Click here to email your Representative and Senators, and demand that they oppose Chuck Schumer’s gun ban. And if you can call House offices today, all the better — given that the House leadership is considering bringing up the renewal of the plastic gun ban very soon. You can call your Representative at 202-225-3121.

Hat tip: BadBlue Gun News.