Allah:
All I have are the tweets from CBS right now. I’ll update with the full quote once it’s available.
In the meantime: W-w-w-what?
NEWS: McConnell says he MIGHT be "open" to "serious suggestions" on new gun control measures after meeting with Comey, Johnson tomorrow.
— Steven Portnoy (@stevenportnoy) June 14, 2016
"Nobody wants terrorists to have firearms," says McConnell. "We're open to serious suggestions from the experts" who run FBI/DHS.
— Steven Portnoy (@stevenportnoy) June 14, 2016
I assume he’s thinking about limiting gun purchases by people on the terror watch list, which Democrats have been pushing for months. Hillary Clinton reiterated her support for the idea yesterday — as did the Trump campaign. When Bloomberg News e-mailed Corey Lewandowski to ask if Trump still believes what he said in November that “If somebody is on a watch list and an enemy of state and we know it’s an enemy of state, I would keep them away, absolutely,” Lewandowski said yep, as far as he knows. Defending the right of someone under suspicion of terrorism to buy a gun makes as much sense to the average voter, I’d guess, as defending child pornography, but there’s a sound reason for it. The list is enormous and there are no due-process protections governing who lands on it; if the feds make a mistake and add you to it, you may lose your right to buy a gun purely because of bureaucratic error. By one estimate, the number of people who are on the list despite having no known affiliation with terrorism is …close to 300,000. At a minimum, if McConnell’s prepared to defer to the FBI and its watch lists to limit gun-buying, he’d need to insist on procedural reforms to narrow the list to true terror suspects and to guarantee some right of appeal.
Why now, though? One certainty about the aftermath of mass shootings is that public interest in gun control spikes and then slowly fades over time. This won’t be an issue in the election unless there’s another attack closer to November and McConnell knows it. One Twitter pal floated the idea that he might be resigned to a Clinton victory already and therefore wants to make a deal now, when he still has some leverage, rather than negotiate gun control with President Hillary next year.