The Gun Vote and 2014: Will There Be an Electoral Price? 538

[rrneck]

33. It's over.

Congress knows it. We had a mass shooting in a school. Defenseless children died at the hands of a mentally unstable person with an "assault weapon". And the ensuing legislation failed. It failed because it was bad legislation. You can't have a law that cannot be enforced without documentation of chain of custody, and at the same time make that documentation illegal.

The NO voters didn't want a national gun register because their constituents didn't want a national gun register. How many YES votes voted that way knowing the bill had zero chance of passage in the senate, not to mention the house? The entire charade was political theater to feed the respective base of both parties. The republicans got steak, Democrats got a Big Mac.

Nobody wants bad people to have guns. But if you want to pass a law that will come any closer to that objective it has to pass constitutional and political muster. Manchin/Toomey did neither. The second amendment has less to do with the issue than the requirements of due process and the rules of evidence. And those are issues that cross party lines a lot more than concerns about the second amendment.