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onehandle

(51,122 posts) Tue Dec 10, 2013, 09:43 AM Dec 2013

After Newtown, focus of U.S. gun control battle shifts to states

A Bushmaster rifle belonging to Sandy Hook Elementary school gunman Adam Lanza in Newtown, Connecticut is seen after its recovery at the school in this police evidence photo released by the state's attorney's office November 25, 2013.

(Reuters) - In the year since the massacre of 26 schoolchildren and adults in Newtown, Connecticut, efforts to pass gun legislation have stalled in the U.S. Congress but shifted to the states, helped by the deep pockets of outgoing New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

In scores of statehouse battles, both gun-control and gun-rights advocates have notched wins since a mentally unstable gunman killed 20 first-graders and six adults at Newtown's Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012.

Electoral and legislative fights since Newtown - including the election last month of a Democratic gun-control supporter, Terry McAuliffe, as governor of Virginia, the home state of the powerful National Rifle Association gun lobby - are likely a foretaste of battles to come next year in federal and state elections.

"We're in this for the long haul," said Mark Glaze, executive director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a coalition founded by Bloomberg. "This issue is like a cruise ship that's been going in the wrong direction for a long time, directly toward the iceberg, and it's going to take a while to turn around."

Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/09/us-usa-shooting-connecticut-guncontrol-idUSBRE9B80E820131209

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After Newtown, focus of U.S. gun control battle shifts to states (Original Post) onehandle Dec 2013 OP

Frankly, the states are where it's at and has been for many years. Eleanors38 Dec 2013 #1

Eleanors38

(18,318 posts)

1. Frankly, the states are where it's at and has been for many years.

Reply to onehandle (Original post)

Tue Dec 10, 2013, 10:55 AM

Dec 2013

And it took this long to discover it? I wonder if Boomie is really trying to build some future organization for a future presidential run.

Bloomberg is a prohibitionist, and most "gun control" is based on prohibitionism. The "common sense" proposals are embraced only after another tired run at prohibition is attempted and fails. This approach has been used for decades, and does Nothing on behalf of the gun control outlooks particular proposal, and further, self-poisons the outlooks over all credibility. This is manifest.

The shotgun approach reveals why gun-control is really about gun prohibition: Ban proposals are slung out in a directions with little meaningful attachment to a social problem. How does a magazine limit stop a mass killing when several "legal" mags are put in a school pack? Think Va Tech. How does a ban on some amorphously-defined "assault weapon" stop someone using an inexpensive and technologically hoary weapon like a pump shotgun? Think Navy Yard. And how do these scatter shot ideas address day-to-day crime? Do these controllers really care?

Transparent motives. Bad policy.

At least the center-right Bloomberg has discovered the 50 states. I do note the Third Way "think tank" comments. Does this spokesperson take a stand? Characteristically, probably not. But his comments do suggest what I suspect is the greater concentration of the elitist gun control outlook in the Party: Third Way centrists.

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