Senate panel casts votes on gun curbs

ALAN FRAM

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON — In Con­gress’ first gun votes since the New­town, Conn., night­mare, the Sen­ate Judi­ciary Com­mit­tee voted Thurs­day to toughen fed­eral penal­ties against ille­gal firearms pur­chases, even as sen­a­tors sig­naled that a deep par­ti­san divide remained over gun curbs.

The Democratic-led panel voted 11–7 to impose penal­ties of up to 25 years for peo­ple who legally buy firearms but give them to some­one else for use in a crime or to peo­ple legally barred from acquir­ing weapons. The panel’s top Repub­li­can, Sen. Charles Grass­ley of Iowa, cast the only GOP vote for the measure.

Pres­i­dent Barack Obama urged law­mak­ers to vote on gun curbs, includ­ing the bill approved Thurs­day, which law­mak­ers named for Hadiya Pendle­ton, the Chicago teenager who was fatally shot days after per­form­ing at Obama’s inauguration.

Con­gress should con­sider those bills “because we need to stop the flow of ille­gal guns to crim­i­nals, and because Hadiya’s fam­ily and too many other fam­i­lies really do deserve a vote,” he said at an Inte­rior Depart­ment ceremony.

The par­ties’ dif­fer­ences were under­scored when sen­a­tors debated a pro­posal by Sen. Dianne Fein­stein, D-Calif., to ban assault weapons and high-capacity ammu­ni­tion mag­a­zines. Democ­rats have noted that such firearms have been used in many recent mass shootings.

“The time has come, Amer­ica, to step up and ban these weapons,” said Fein­stein, a lead spon­sor of a 1994 assault weapons ban that expired a decade later. She added, “How could I stand by and see this car­nage go on?”

The response from Repub­li­cans was that ban­ning such weapons was uncon­sti­tu­tional, would take firearms from law-abiding cit­i­zens, and would have lit­tle impact because only a small per­cent­age of crimes involve assault weapons or mag­a­zines car­ry­ing many rounds of ammunition.

“Are we really going to pass another law that will have zero effect, then pat our­selves on the back for doing some­thing won­der­ful?” said Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Sen­ate Republican.

The two other bills would require back­ground checks for nearly all gun pur­chases and pro­vide around $40 mil­lion a year for schools to buy secu­rity equip­ment. The com­mit­tee was expected to vote on those mea­sures and the assault weapons ban on Tuesday.

Thursday’s debate made it clear that despite recent mass slay­ings, new gun restric­tions face a dif­fi­cult path in a Con­gress in which the National Rifle Asso­ci­a­tion and con­ser­v­a­tive vot­ers have a loud voice. Obama pro­posed a broad pack­age of gun curbs in Jan­u­ary, includ­ing a call for back­ground checks for nearly all gun pur­chases and an assault weapons ban.

Solid oppo­si­tion from Repub­li­cans, and likely resis­tance from mod­er­ate Democ­rats from GOP-leaning states, seems all but cer­tain to doom the assault weapons ban when gun bills reach the full Sen­ate, prob­a­bly in April. The fate of the other bills is uncertain.

The Sen­ate mea­sures were all crafted since the Decem­ber slay­ings of 20 chil­dren and six edu­ca­tors at Sandy Hook Ele­men­tary School in New­town, Conn. That mas­sacre plus oth­ers in Aurora, Colo., Tuc­son, Ariz., and else­where, have made guns a top national topic but have not erased many law­mak­ers’ con­cerns about pro­tect­ing gun rights.

Feinstein’s assault weapons pro­hi­bi­tion “rep­re­sents the biggest gun ban pro­posal in our his­tory,” Grass­ley said. He argued that firearms bans don’t work and said, “Had this bill been law at the time, Sandy Hook still would have hap­pened” because shooter Adam Lanza used a legally owned gun he took from his mother.

Democ­rats dis­agreed, argu­ing that assault weapons fir­ing large num­bers of bul­lets make killers like Lanza even deadlier.

“The plain, sim­ple, blunt fact is that some if not all of the beau­ti­ful chil­dren who per­ished that day in New­town, along with the great edu­ca­tors who gave their lives try­ing to save those chil­dren, might well be alive today if this ban had been in effect,” said Sen. Richard Blu­men­thal, D-Conn.

The bill boost­ing fed­eral penal­ties for ille­gal gun pur­chases, whose chief spon­sor is the committee’s chair­man, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., was one of the least con­tro­ver­sial mea­sures that sen­a­tors are debat­ing. Stud­ies have shown that large num­bers of firearms used in crimes are pur­chased illegally.

Both par­ties agree that stiffer penal­ties are needed to sti­fle gun traf­fick­ing and straw pur­chases, when some­one legally buys a gun to give to a crim­i­nal or some­one else not allowed to have one. Cur­rently, law enforce­ment offi­cials pros­e­cute the prac­tice with laws that for­bid lying on forms for gun pur­chases, pun­ish­able by up to 10 years in prison.

The bill was approved after Grass­ley inserted lan­guage requir­ing the Jus­tice Depart­ment to take steps aimed at pre­vent­ing a repeat of the agency’s botched Fast and Furi­ous gun smug­gling inves­ti­ga­tion. Repub­li­cans, who also expressed wor­ries that peo­ple might be pros­e­cuted for unwit­tingly giv­ing firearms to some­one who ends up using them in a crime, indi­cated GOP sup­port could grow if some changes are made.

Expand­ing back­ground checks is the cor­ner­stone of Democ­rats’ gun pro­pos­als. That effort suf­fered a set­back this week when Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., dropped efforts to write a com­pro­mise with Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla.

Coburn’s bless­ing could have won cru­cial sup­port from Repub­li­cans and mod­er­ate Democ­rats because he is a solid con­ser­v­a­tive with an A-rating from the National Rifle Asso­ci­a­tion. Schumer and two allies — mod­er­ate Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Mark Kirk, R-Ill. — said they would con­tinue seek­ing com­pro­mise with other Republicans.

Back­ground checks are now required for sales by the nation’s 55,000 fed­er­ally licensed gun deal­ers, not for pri­vate sales between indi­vid­u­als, like those at gun shows or online.

The school aid mea­sure by Sen. Bar­bara Boxer, D-Calif., and oth­ers would pro­vide $40 mil­lion a year in grants for rein­forced school doors and other secu­rity mea­sures, plus cre­ate a new pro­gram with exist­ing funds to improve col­lege safety.

Posted by AP News on Mar 8 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.