Kristen Gillibrand Proposes 'Gun Trafficking' Bill

Kristen Gillibrand is hardly a rare breed. After all, an anti-gun Democrat is about as rare as air. However, the senator from New York who took Hillary Clinton’s seat is trying to make a name for herself. Her most recent proposal would do just that, she apparently believes.

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A New York lawmaker is making a bid to bring back federal legislation that would make selling guns to a prohibited possessor worth 20 years in federal prison.

The measure, proposed by U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, D-NY, would make it a crime to sell two or more guns to someone whom the seller knows is prohibited from legally possessing them. It is a repeat of legislation proposed by Gillibrand in 2013 and 2015 that never made it out of committee.

“Over the last year and a half, our country has suffered through three of the five biggest mass-shootings in our history and thousands more Americans have been victims of gun violence on a much smaller scale, but Congress has done nothing to solve this crisis,” Gillibrand said in a statement.

The bill, termed the Hadiya Pendleton and Nyasia Pryear-Yard Gun Trafficking and Crime Prevention Act, is named after two teens killed in New York with guns traced to out-of-state origins.

The problems with this are obvious. After all, it’s difficult to prove what people know and what they don’t know.

Further, Gillibrand’s argument regarding the mass shootings is complete bollocks. Neither Orlando, Las Vegas, nor Sutherland Springs were cases of people selling guns to anyone they knew to be prohibited. The shooters in Orlando and Las Vegas weren’t prohibited, and the Sutherland Springs killer passed NICS background checks, so it’s unlikely anyone would have had any reason to believe he was actually prohibited.

All Gillibrand is doing is grandstanding, which is par for the course.

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If she wanted to actually make an impact on mass shootings following Sutherland Springs, then why not look at legislation that would push the Department of Defense to add relevant information to the NICS? That might actually make a difference.

Alright, probably not much of one, but at least it would deal with something that actually happened.

Instead, Gillibrand wants to pretend that there’s this epidemic of people just selling their personal firearms to people they know can’t legally own them, but offers no evidence.

Instead, what’s happening are straw sales (which are already illegal) and people breaking other laws in the process. We don’t actually need yet another law, one that could land innocent people in hot water for selling a firearm in good faith to the wrong person. No good will actually comes of a law like this, only a lot of heartache.

But Gillibrand doesn’t care. She simply wants to look like she’s tough on crime without having to actually do anything at all about the actual problem of crime.

Par for the course from our political elite. We should be used to it by now, but since there pathetic efforts usually impact us gun owners more than the criminals, it’s kind of hard to let it slide.

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