Stevieslaw: Senate signs off on gun control measure
The U.S. Senate showed some spine today as it passed its strongest gun control measure in decades. In a startlingly bipartisan manner, the Senate voted 64 to 36 to deny Osama Bin Laden automatic access to an assault rifle should he ever reanimate, immigrate to the United States and become a citizen. Under the stated conditions, the government could appeal to the Federal Courts to deny Bin Laden a weapon, provided they did so within a three day “waiting period.”
The Senate was able to overcome the influence of the National Rifle Association in this instance. The NRA had argued that the Senate Bill went much too far and was just another “nail in the coffin” of the Second Amendment. Earlier in the day, the NRA was successful in blocking a bill that would have prohibited the sale of assault weapons to all dead citizens.
The entire issue of reanimation was the subject of a rigorous debate on the Senate floor. Some Democrats went so far as to argue that there was no such thing and that the entire bill was nonsense. “Not so,” said Kansas Senator Pat Roberts, who accused the Democrats of not watching “Game of Thrones” this season, in which the character Jon Snow was reanimated in time to lead his troops into battle. Bob Casey, Senator from Pennsylvania, pointed out that Game of Thrones was a TV series based on a set of novels. After much back and forth, it was concluded that the sense of the Senate was that “reanimation of humans” was certainly currently possible and that the medical and physical arguments against it did not represent “settled science.”
Additional bills to deprive other dead people, including Hitler and Stalin, of access to weapons are currently stalled in committee.