Senator Diane Feinstein was on NBC’s Meet the Press this morning (click the image above for the full interview). The primary topic, as you’d expect, was the Las Vegas massacre and the senior senator from California’s legislative proposal to ban bump fire stocks. During the interview, host Chuck Todd asked her a very reasonable question . . .
Let me ask you this. Give me the slate of laws that, if you could wave your wand and have enacted, that could have prevented Vegas.
As someone who has introduced fourteen gun control bills during her time in the world’s greatest deliberative body, you’d think Di would have had a well-rehearsed, pat answer to regurgitate in response. You’d be wrong.
After a fleeting blank stare and a pause, she said . . .
I don’t know. I would have to take a good look at that and really study it. I’m not sure there is any set of laws that could have prevented it.
No, Senator Feinstein hasn’t suddenly come over to the pro-gun side’s way of thinking where gun control legislation is concerned. She simply committed a Kinsley gaffe. The good senator inadvertently let the truth slip that nothing she or her hoplophobic compatriots in Congress can do will ever stop someone who’s determined to commit mass murder as Stephen Paddock was.
Is that fact an obvious contradiction given that she just introduced a new bill to ban bump fire stocks? Of course it is. Will it stop her from pushing forward with her latest gun control proposal? Please.
In fact she almost immediately went on to defend her bill. After alluding to her preference that all guns be registered as cars are, and being sure to point out to Mr. and Mrs. America watching at home that “this can happen to anyone,” she said this:
We can do one simple thing. Forget all your esoteric arguments (about Americans’ support for gun rights) for a moment. One simple thing to change it; to make these additive devices, whatever they are, illegal.
So to sum up, Senator Feinstein — perhaps the most dedicated gun controller in the history of the US Congress — doesn’t know of any laws that would have stopped the slaughter that happened last week in Las Vegas. But it doesn’t really matter.
Her bill is important and should be passed. The bump fire stock ban, she said, must be “codified by Congress,” not regulated through a change in policy by the ATF. Because we need to do one…simple…thing.
Same as it ever was.