For quite some time, Democrats have been determined to pass universal background checks. They want them bad.

On the state level, they exist in a number of places. We haven’t really seen them do any good, of course, but we’re constantly told that the issue is all the other states that don’t have them. That’s part of why Democrats say they’re pushing for them at the federal level. At that point, everyone would be on the same page.

Or something.

However, I’m not a fan for a lot of reasons. Just one of them is that anything that is pushed for this dishonestly can’t be good for our nation.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (Iowa), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, on Thursday blocked a request to proceed to legislation passed by the House in March to expand background checks for gun sales, a priority that has languished in Congress for years.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a leading advocate for gun control legislation, asked for unanimous consent to proceed to the House bill, citing the recent school shooting in Michigan that left four students dead.

“I want to tell you why I’m making this request. I understand the low likelihood of success, but I hope many of my colleagues took a minute to watch the cellphone video from the school shooting in Michigan,” he said on the Senate floor, calling the footage “absolutely terrifying to watch.”

Murphy recounted the chilling surveillance footage of 15-year-old [name redacted] emerging from a bathroom with a 9mm Sig Sauer SP 2022 pistol with a 15-round magazine and firing at classmates and teachers.

“All of those kids who fled that violence, all of those kids who now don’t think of school as a safe place, they are going through trauma and will go through trauma that will take a lifetime to address,” Murphy said.

Oh, that’s all very horrible…except the gun used was lawfully purchased by the kid’s father, who underwent a background check.

See, that’s the dishonesty I’m talking about. Murphy has access to the exact same information I do, if not more, and yet he’s trying to use Oxford to justify a bit of gun control that would have made absolutely no difference. None.

Frankly, Grassley is right to block the request if for no other reason than Murphy being the two-bit political hack we all know him to be.

Universal background checks sound fine to a lot of people, at least in concept, but how could they have prevented a shooting where the gun was originally purchased lawfully and then taken by someone else and used in such a horrific manner?

While Murphy is right about the trauma those kids experienced, he’s completely out of line to try and use this shooting to justify this legislation. The two have absolutely nothing to do with one another and anyone with half a brain knows it.

Then again, considering the jackwagons who immediately called for bans of AR-15s as soon as they learned there had been a shooting, no one should be particularly surprised by this.

Murphy and most other anti-Second Amendment types are notorious for using the bodies of dead kids to push their agenda, even when that agenda has almost no bearing on the situation.

Grassley and the rest of the GOP should stand proud that they’re refusing to bend to guilt-tripping, especially when the guilt is so horribly misplaced.