Biden to Meet With NRA

I’m sure folks are probably going to spin this as the sellout in progress, but Biden has been meeting with the gun control advocates for days now and having discussions. It’s helpful to see what they say. Same reason we listened in on what the Brady’s had to say. It can reveal their thinking, and reveal information that can be useful. You don’t go into battle blind, and political battle is no different.

Related posts (automatically generated):

  1. Debate Impressions
  2. Joe Biden Thinks We Have Issues
  3. Obama’s Next Move

25 thoughts on “Biden to Meet With NRA”

  1. As I said on Twitter, I’m sure whoever gets to sit back and listen to Biden ramble will be more entertained than us when we just heard “we are better than this” on loop.

  3. While he obviously didn’t entirely believe it, Churchill said “To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.” in 1954.

        1. Hell, a janitor in the NRA building could whack the VPOTUS with a rolled up copy of the U.S. Constitution and send him scurrying.

          That condescending mental midget should be given a 20 minute lesson on our rights and then sent packing. There is to be no compromise with tyrants.

  5. Education Secretary Arne Duncan will meet with education groups, parents and teachers. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius will meet with mental health advocates. Other senior White House staff members will meet with medical groups, community organizations and advocates for children and families to discuss gun violence, the White House said.

    Groups I would not normally expect pro-2A suggestions from.

    Were I the NRA, I would arrive with detailed plans in hand to implement any suggestion I might have and supporting evidence of existing work. School resource officers, for example, isn’t a new idea.

  6. I can envision how they are already trying to “divide and conquer”. It will be some “Hunting Association/Organization” versus the Guys-with-evil-semi-automatic-weapons. See the guys with semi-autos are being “unreaasonable” and don’t want to agree to our “reasonable” restrictions and suggestions.

    Classic Divide-and-conquer routine. NRA should ensure that they gather enough of all factions of the firearm owning coalition. Self-Defense, Hunters, Recreational shooters, C&R and Other Firearm Collectors, Shooting Sports enthusiasts, etc.

    As NRA/ILA probably already knows, this Administration/Bloomberg/Giffords PAC, etc will try to divide us…and then play on heartstring compassion to get anything and everything they want passed.

    I am donating to NRA ILA weekly as much as my extra-household budget allows, besides already having written/contacted my Senators and Congresspeople.

    1. While I’m sure some number of Fudds can be split off, hunting is proportionately less important as more and more people buy guns for self-defense, especially in the “free” 42 states with de jure or de facto shall issue. And especially as the population ages; as their physical abilities decline many realize they need the equalizer of a gun. Especially with the media coverage of crime that isn’t reflecting the decreasing rates of it.

      But there’s also reasons assault rifles have been flying off the shelves for a while; one of our hosts mentioned the one of disasters where “When the police are days away….” People are justifiably concerned about the future especially WRT to the competence of the government and that government telling them to it wants their guns will not fly for them.

      I guess my point here is to dismiss the Fudds who will support this, like the presumptive Democratic Virginia gubernatorial nominee who just bought an expensive Beretta over-and-under at Dicks but who wants to ban “assault weapons” and so on (there’s got to be some sort of trifecta there). These are not the people who are going to deny a Congresscriter reelection in the coming years, it’s the ones who will be directly affected or the hunters like my father, well, pretty much all the rest of my family, who can see where this will go and never supported gun control in the first place. Although I suppose we’ve always kept handguns for utility and self-defense so maybe we’ve never been true Fudds.

  7. So what’s your suggestion? Seriously. The anti-gunners are proposing bills left and right to restrict our rights. Why aren’t you all coming together with a plan that pushes the argument in our favor? They want to push the fence 100′ in our direction, you need to push the fence 100′ in their direction so’s the final outcome is closer to 0′ than 50′ in our direction. I posted my thoughts a while back (and was overly verbose, sorry, long day at work), but I still don’t hear any proposal from anyone on our side. I just hear defense.

    1. There is action on this side. It’s just being held till we see the whites of their eyes.

      Speaking only for my neck of the woods…

      1. Why? Why not get your plan out now? The whites of their eyes may not be visible yet, but that’s ’cause they’re beady eyed squinty types.

        But seriously, I’d get the ideas out now and force them to play defense. “the best defense is a good offense.”. It does seem like anyone on our side is playing offense.

        1. I’m *hoping* that the cards are close to the vest, and there’s a real idea there. If the same blustering lines are trotted out, it’ll be a waste of time.

          Personally, I haven’t found too many drawbacks with the “Enforce Existing Law” strategy as one leg, with improvements to NICS. Improve state reporting (require it, even), improve mental health reporting. Recent mass shootings would have taken on different characterizations since the shooters got their weapons legally (latest one got his illegally via murder, but as far as I can tell, that’s actually the outlier). Maybe they would have gotten via illegal methods, maybe switched tactics to explosives, I can’t say. Maybe timing would have been thrown off enough for intervention by other means.

          I think Sebastian may have brought it up some time back about a simple public interface to NICS where private transactions could verify the person they were selling to. Make it easy and free, and I suspect there would be a good bit of voluntary use. After all, no one wants to be the guy who sold a weapon to a stranger that turned out to be a prohibited person, or criminally insane.

          My concern on the armed officers plan is that no details on how to pay for it are out there. Also, that’s just schools. The next guy shoots up a parade, then…armed guards on the floats, perhaps.

          I think we have the minds on our side that can come up with good solutions to help in the fight evil in society without further infringements.

          1. (require it, even)

            It can’t be required. The states are not subdivisions of the United States, they are separate sovereigns. Congress can’t require states to implement federal programs. They can only use the carrot, and not the stick.

            I’ve talked about a lot of things in the past, but now isn’t the time to talk about that. Not in the middle of a political fight. We have to push them back everywhere we can.

          2. Well, there’s also the NRA’s offense, a “National School Shield Program”, and to go further, repeal the Gun Free School Zone law, which we want to do anyway because of the land mines it sets up for people traveling near school. There’s an H.R. 35 already introduced for that, but thomas.gov doesn’t like to give out permalinks and there’s no text anyway as of when I compose this.

            […] a simple public interface to NICS where private transactions could verify the person they were selling to. Make it easy and free…

            And people will inappropriately use it for employment screening and all sorts of unrelated things, which would prompt various states to stop reporting mental health info to it (it’s the only national database of this info that I know of). “Free” also means it would probably quickly overload the existing NICS capacity, which is already being strained by the volume of gun purchases … well, I guess the latter is self-correcting as inventory drops to 0 and future purchases will be production constrained, but opening it up without sufficient care would probably put it in a permanent running slow state, which may allow a nasty loophole for keeping permanent records per MAIG.

            Which is not to say it isn’t a potentially good idea, just that it’s not simple or cheap. And it would be a slippery slope from voluntary usage of it to mandatory; add the concern that in violation of law, or using loopholes for a subset of translations, permanent records are being kept, I’d expect serious sincere opposition to the whole idea.

            And I’ll note the NICS is to a great extent the NRA’s baby, but they’re not advocating this.

            1. Ron Paul attempted that same repeal in 2011. I suspect it will go nowhere. My only issue with School Shield is that it’s just a reaction to the last event (though I’m curious as to the plan to pay for it). Not really a general proposal, though it hits the .

              A public access point to NICS could be simple enough to make it unattractive, or not really relevant, for other uses. Punch in a drivers license number, for example, on a phone interface, get back a “proceed” or “denied” or “delayed” and maybe a transaction number. That’s it. No background check results, etc. Lean, scalable, and not informative enough as a screening tool (unless you’re hiring an armed guard, I guess). No, it’s not free to implement, but it shouldn’t be exorbitantly expensive, either. Government purchasing problems aside, anyway. It doesn’t become registration, no new restrictions, just working to improve the enforcement of existing law.

              However, in the end, this is just an idea. It really boils down to, if we want to win the support of the wavering center and force grabbers onto the defensive, then we must have a thought out plan and market it before the others get theirs together. Give politicos a path that satisfies most of their constituents, and don’t throw other groups, like video gamers, under the bus. Would they become allies? Not necessarily, but there’s no point in swelling the opposition’s ranks.

              1. Ron Paul’s attempt in 2011 wasn’t in the context of Yet Another School Massacre, and I agree success is currently improbable, but as an offensive tactic it’s great, it gets the opposition to argue against actively defending school children, a true loser, or at least arguing over how to do it.

                Your example of a NICS public access point is a background check. “Denied” means any one of several bad things, plus some number of effectively bogus misdemeanor domestic violence convictions (back when that wasn’t so freighted) and of course errors. Which in the context of a employment background check will never get a chance to be corrected or explained. Oh, and discriminating against the mentally ill is generally illegal, isn’t it?

                And I must reiterate, getting states to report mental health disbarments is like pulling teeth due to privacy issues, many like Pennsylvania still don’t do it, and making the NICS public without solving this problem would just make that worse. It’s a hard problem to solve, I’ve tried and haven’t come up with any solutions.

            2. Ah, looks like the text of the bill, which is now us, has a permalink, and from that I can get to what looks like a permalink to the top level Bill Summary & Status, which when you find it through a search doesn’t have a permalink. One co-sponsor from Georgia, and it’s been referred to the House Judiciary Committee.

  8. What ticks me off about that article is that The Hill is covering for gun control groups by referring to them as “gun safety organizations.”

    1. It is disgusting.

      The NRA needs to tell the VPOTUS that if you want to provide a measure of safety for our children then we need armed teachers and parents in our schools. Repeal the gun free zones immediately.

    1. Then he’s just show up toting one of his over-and-under shotguns … I doubt I’d want to be anywhere near Biden holding a loaded gun ^_^.

    1. Per Rob Crawford’s and my observation, they’ve updated the story, “Walmart, apparently, has caved.”

Comments are closed.