Parkland Rep Thinks GOP Will Have To Side With 10 Round Mag Limit

The saving grace to Democrats controlling the House is that Republicans control the Senate. While the GOP has far too many people who are squishy on gun rights, we can at least trust partisanship to have our back if nothing else.

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It’s how I sleep at night, to be honest.

But Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Fla.), while unveiling a bill seeking to limit magazines to just ten rounds, said that he thinks Republicans will side with the ban.

Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Fla.), along with Reps. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) and Dina Titus (D-Nev.), unveiled Tuesday legislation along with Sens. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) to prohibit the transfer, importation, or possession of magazines able to hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition.

Menendez told reporters that he believes “the reality of a Democratic majority sending legislation” from the House, including on expanding background checks, “creates an impetus and a challenge for the Republican leader in the Senate.”

Deutch added that “there are two houses of Congress, but there’s only one electorate and the dozens of new members of the House who now form a gun safety majority, the House of Representatives, were elected in large part because they were willing to stand on the side of their families and safety in their communities over the side of the gun makers.”

“And the senators from their states represent the same people,” he said. “And the hope, our hope on our side is that those senators will come to that realization themselves and understand that just as all of those House members who, for years, thought they could sit back and pretend that the voices coming from their communities advocating for change weren’t going to affect them, those voices have been silenced and they’ve been replaced by a gun safety majority. The senators who represented them should recognize that the same possibility exist for them. They should stand with families and their communities for commonsense measures that can help keep people safe.”

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Deutch is living off pie-in-the-sky.

Public opinion supported gun control for far longer than normal after Parkland, which is surprising, but that sentiment is starting to wane even as we speak. The public is weary of the discussion and has also noted that despite the lack of legislation in many places, there hasn’t been a slew of mass shootings. Meanwhile, one of the most significant mass shootings since Parkland a year ago was the Thousand Oaks shooting in California. That’s a state that already has all of these proposals on the books, and guess what? They didn’t help.

They’re starting to understand that mass shootings are complex problems that won’t be solved by punishing law-abiding Americans who didn’t do a damn thing wrong in the first place.

So no, there’s not some major onus on Republican lawmakers to jump on the gun control bandwagon.

Especially since doing so will cost many of them re-election and they damn well know it. Deutch is trying to intimidate Republicans with threats of election defeat, but he forgets that they’re elected by an entire state, not the liberal enclaves in the cities.

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In other words, making a wrong vote on gun control can be costly, but not like Deutch is trying to claim.

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