A long time ago, the Brady Campaign used to be an influential gun control group. Today it is on the decline and barely noticed behind Michael Bloomberg’s various groups, but every once in a while the media throws them a sympathy story.

Today’s “news” from Brady is that they’re  really, really upset that New York Senator Chuck Schumer isn’t pouring his political capital into a doomed cause.

A leading gun control group is blasting Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) for a lack of movement on the issue.

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence on Monday called out the third-highest ranking Senate Democrat for a lack of action on gun reform.

Schumer, who is seen as one of the strongest supporters of gun control in the Senate, has yet to fulfill his promise of holding a vote on background check legislation this year, Brady charged.

“He made a promise to a room full of advocates, leaders, and gun violence victims last fall in New York to bring an expanded background check bill to the floor this year,” said Brady spokesman Brendan Kelly. “With the first quarter down, he hasn’t done it.”

It’s probably going to come as a great disappointment to Mr. Brendan Kelly and his employers at Brady, but one of the few things that politicians hate more than losing elections is wasting the time to author a bill which has no chance of getting out of committee for a vote, and when it comes to the sort of background checks favored by the Brady Campaign and other gun control groups, we’re discussing an already well-trod path of failure.

The Manchin-Toomey attempt to force “universal” background checks on law-abiding citizens (which would of course be ignored by criminals) was tried in 2013 and it failed to pass. The attempt to push Machin-Toomey is partially credited with gun-rights supporting Republicans trouncing anti-gun Democrats in the 2014 mid-terms.  Ever since the failure of Manchin-Toomey, any time there is a violent crime of some significance, the scripted cry, “universal background checks!” bursts forth from Brady, or one or more of Michael Bloomberg’s various anti-gun vanity projects.

Time and again they’ve sought to impose more background checks as a band aid to solution to each and every violent crime, even when background checks were not remotely related to the issue at hand.

Gun control supporters screamed about needing more background checks after San Bernardino, even though the guns used in the attack went through a NICS background checks. They screamed about needing more background checks after the Charleston church massacre,  even though the murderer when through the background check system (it failed to identify him as a prohibited person, thanks to bad data entry at the local law enforcement level).

Sadly, the Charleston example isn’t atypical; there are many dangerously mentally ill people and criminals alike who are technically prohibited persons, but who do not appear in the NICS databases due to an overwhelmed criminal justice and mental health care system lacking the resources to upload accurate data with any sort of consistency or accuracy.

As a matter of unavoidable fact, we know that the NICS checks system will continue to allow prohibited persons to pass background checks and acquire firearms until these systems for prohibited persons data entry are both streamlined and better funded at the local level.

The Brady Campaign’s delirious cry, “universal background checks!” when the system itself is deeply flawed is self-evidently absurd. It’s an argument that since so many fish are slipping though the torn net of our background check system, that we should make the school of fish bigger, instead of fixing the net.

This doesn’t make any sense to sane people, or Senators.