Led by one who knows how — Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) — House Democrats, frustrated by the GOP’s refusal to allow votes on gun bills, staged a sit-in on the chamber floor.
NYT: House Democrats’ Gun-Control Sit-In Turns Into Chaotic Showdown With Republicans
House Democrats shout Paul Ryan down as he tries to stop sit-in
Enough with the idiots aka humans. You will never be able to legislate common sense, compassion, decency, let alone reasoned thought & compromise. Some people have it, lots more don’t. Blah blah blah blah blah ….. screw the Politicians. For now, anyway.
After one more mass murder, one more (plus) divisive, repugnant statement by the presumptive nominee of a once proud Political Party, I retreated to my garden. A little birdie told me to. He wasn’t the Bernie Birdie but a sweet little goldfinch who poked his head in through the window bars & gave me a look like Hey stupid! It’s beautiful out here! What are you doing in there?
I love the feel of the soil, the warmth of the sunshine, the sounds of the birds. I do two things well: baking & growing tomatoes. I have the knack where these are concerned. Each spring I plant tomato seeds indoors, heating mats under their roots, grow lights over their leaves. They are watered, fed, coddled. Memorial Day weekend they make the great move into a plot turned over with compost, green sand & fertilizer. And now they grow. Beautifully, silently, blossoms tempting the big fat bumblebees. All is well. The cycle of nature continues. A few moments of sanity & peace.
*The meaning of the title for this Post? Gardening is a great way to daydream. One day I thought about all the great theme songs TV shows used to have. If my life was a show, what theme would it be? For whatever reason, the theme from Room 222 kept bouncing around my noggin. I like it. I will always be a relic from the ’70s 😉
It’s become a national formula: Mass Shooting > Public Outrage > Anti-Gun Votes on Capitol Hill > NRA Says No = Nothing Happens (until the next killings re-boot the equation).
Will the deadliest of all machine-gun rampages in U.S. history yield a different outcome in Senate voting? University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato says that, still again, no version not approved by the NRA will make it.
An amendment by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., would allow the attorney general to deny a gun sale to anyone if she has a “reasonable belief” — a lesser standard than “probable cause” — that the buyer was likely to engage in terrorism. The proposal is popularly known as the “no-fly, no-buy” amendment, but wouldn’t just apply to people on the “no fly” terrorist watch list.
A Republican alternative by Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, which would require that law enforcement be alerted when anyone on the terror watch list attempts to buy a weapon from a licensed dealer. If the buyer has been investigated for terrorism within the past five years, the attorney general could block a sale for up to three days while a court reviews the sale.
An amendment by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, would make it more difficult to add mentally ill people to the background check database, giving people suspected of serious mental illness a process to challenge that determination.
An amendment by Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., that would close the “gun show loophole” by requiring every gun purchaser to undergo a background check, and to expand the background check database.