Frustrating eager Capitol Hill anti-gunners who desperately want to pass new gun restrictions, President Donald Trump has been “taking his time on the issue to avoid passing ‘feel-good legislation’,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley reportedly told Fox News.
This comes as a new Rasmussen poll released this week shows that 75 percent of American adults believe the Constitution “guarantees the right of an average citizen to own a gun.”
Alarmingly, the poll also revealed that “15% disagree. Ten percent (10%) are not sure.”
According to Rasmussen, “These findings are virtually unchanged in surveying since Rasmussen Reports first asked this question 10 years ago.”
But there is a problem, in that 24 percent of survey respondents favor repealing the Second Amendment, while 60 percent oppose that idea and 16 percent are undecided.”
Essentially, this translates to that 24 percent concurring that the Second Amendment protects the individual right, and they don’t want their fellow citizens to have that right.
Attorney General Bill Barr reportedly met with senators Tuesday to talk about proposed gun legislation, according to Fox News. Democrats are pushing a familiar agenda of expanded background checks and so-called “red flag laws” in the wake of mass shooting incidents earlier this summer in California, Ohio and Texas.
According to The Hill, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has been taking his time while Democrat Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) declared it is time to “put up or shut up.” Schumer, a perennial anti-gunner, wants McConnell to allow debate on gun control measures. McConnell is apparently holding off until the president makes it clear what he will or won’t support. McConnell, however, maintains he is in a “holding pattern.”
It is possible Trump will make an announcement this week, just as many of the nation’s leading gun rights activists are heading to Phoenix, Arizona for the 34th annual Gun Rights Policy Conference.
“Feel-good legislation” has been a problem for the Second Amendment community for many years. Rights activists contend laws already adopted have not prevented any of the crimes they were designed to prevent, and proposed legislation would not prevent those crimes, either. What such laws have done, and will likely continue to do is make it tougher for law-abiding citizens, activists argue.
Killers who opened fire in Dayton, El Paso and Gilroy, Calif., actually purchased their firearms legally and cleared background checks in the process. The shooter in Odessa, Texas reportedly purchased his firearm privately after having failed a background check in 2014, and there is some indication he purchased it from a man who may have illegally built and sold the gun, as reported by the National Review.
Meanwhile, the Rasmussen survey—taken from 1,000 American adults Sept. 5 and 8—shows 84 percent of Republicans but only 66 percent of Democrats agree the Constitution protects individual gun ownership. Likewise, 77 percent of independents believe the Constitution protects the right to have a gun.
Last year, retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens proposed repealing the Second Amendment in an Op-Ed published by the New York Times.
