Skip to main content

Dems "weren't even close" to bringing back HB 88

Attorney General Beau Biden didn't show up to argue his point about HB 88.

And behind closed doors Senate Democrats couldn't muster any more support for the flawed bill on guns and mental illness than they had at the end of the last session:
Senate President Pro Tem Patricia Blevins, D-Elsmere, who supported the bill, said Democrats “weren’t even close” to finding enough votes to bring the bill back for debate. 
It is important to understand what happened here:  the Democratic leadership will come up with all sorts of reasons why the bill failed:  the NRA and First State Liberty's Eric Boye will doubtless be among them.  So should thousands of people in Delaware who signed petitions and wrote letters/emails to their Senators to oppose the bill.

The reality is that this was a flawed bill from the start, and the amendments offered did not improve it.

Supporters of the bill were unable to address the issue that passing HB 88 into law might cause fewer people with problems like depression, alcoholism, or PTSD from seeking treatment.

Many mental health professionals, while reluctant to speak publicly, were privately concerned with the "duty to report" provisions that would leave them practicing "defensively" rather than always in their clients' best interest.

The standard for confiscation--"clear and convincing evidence"--was, as written, far too amenable for later watering down to the insidiously weak "preponderance of the evidence" standard that the Federal government now insists be used in all civil rights and sexual harassment complaints--and insisted upon based on Executive fiat rather than Legislative process.

Oddly enough this all plays out against the background of another senseless shooting, this time in a Florida movie theater, where the victim had refused to stop texting and then apparently threw popcorn at an armed man.  The 71-year-old man who alleged fired the shots was retired Tampa police officer.

It is worth considering (when you're thinking about the politics of gun control in Delaware) that many of the same supporters of this bill also supported an exemption for current and retired police officers in last year's not-quite-universal background checks law.

How did that happen?

How did police officers, who suffer as a group from higher rates of depression, alcoholism, domestic abuse, and PTSD than the general population, get exempted from a gun control measure in a state where everyone from the Attorney General on down to the former Delaware State Police officer who is the Speaker of the House tells us they have nothing in mind but public safety?

Could it be that there's simply politics as usual on all sides of this debate?

Comments

delacrat said…
Every nut can get a gun, but not everyone can get a job.

God Bless Amerika !

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?