Gun Control Bill Defeated by US Senate.

In the past few hours the US Senate has rejected the Manchin-Toomey gun control bill 54 votes to 46. This has prompted a series of emotional outbursts from voters who supported the bill and some pretty wild accusations and personal attacks on those Senators who opposed the bill from supposedly professional politicians such as President Obama and New York City Mayor Micheal Bloomberg. Despite this I think the Senate has made the correct decision because recent efforts of gun control have always struck me as a perfect example of bad law.

The clamour for tighter gun control laws has been an emotionally driven knee-jerk reaction to the horrors of primarily the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre in Newtown Connecticut. However the proposed solutions would simply do nothing to prevent such a tragedy happening again. Putting aside the more sinister dimension to the Newtown massacre it was a crime that could just as easily and possibly more effectively been carried out by someone using low velocity, high calibre handguns. This is exactly what happened in Dunblane in the UK in 1996 when Thomas Hamilton killed 16 children with four pistols in a very similar incident. Therefore the proposed ban on assault-style weapons such as the AR-15 Bushmaster used in Newtown or high capacity magazines would not have prevented the Newtown massacre. Also the gunman Adam Lanza did not buy the guns he used which were actually owned by his mother. Therefore he did not undergo any form of background check and still would not have undergone any form of background check under the changes proposed by Manchin-Toomey. Therefore the proposed law would not achieve what it set out to achieve making it an example of a law nobody needs. So by rejecting it the Senate was simply doing it's job.

The thing that worries me though is that it is very easy to make the argument that the Boston bombings made the whole issue of Newtown so toxic that Senators simply baulked at the idea of passing such  measure so soon after the Boston attacks. This plays right into the hands of those who carried out the Boston attacks because it makes it look like their bold action has prevented an unpopular bill being passed. There is a strong risk that this 'success' will encourage people to repeat the actions in Boston. That particularly increases the pressure on President Obama because newly empowered anti-government groups are likely to increase the perceived threat to him personally and that perception is only likely to discourage him from taking decisive action against those responsible for Boston.

Also the true tragedy of America's gun culture comes not from the emotive and headline grabbing spectacle of mass-shootings such as Newtown or Aurora. Instead it comes from the quiet and low intensity tragedy of just one or two people being shot and killed often by armed criminals that takes place in every single one of America's cities every single day.

Therefore I hope that Obama will find the courage to drop the idea of assault weapon bans and restrictions on magazine size and instead introduce stripped-back gun control measures that will simply focus on extending background checks to the majority of gun sales. After all I have absolutely no problem with removing certain Constitutional rights including the right to bear arms from convicted criminals. I also believe that it is entirely possible to do this without creating an unconstitutional national register of gun owners.

23:35 on 17/4/13.