Senator Pushes New NRA Endorsed Gun Control Law

– Backed by the National Rifle Association, the Senate’s No. 2 Republican leader introduced legislation Wednesday that would reward states for sending more information about residents with serious mental problems to the federal background check system for firearms purchasers.

New NRA endorsed bill aims at preventing some mentally ill patients from buying guns.

The bill has also received support from the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the Treatment Advocacy Center, the National Association of Social Workers, and several police and prison organizations.

Sen. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., already announced legislation that would require firearms retailers to wait for a complete background check on prospective buyers before selling guns to them.

Cornyn’s laws is way extra restricted than a Senate measure increasing background verify necessities that Republicans and the NRA helped defeat two years in the past. Cornyn has an A-plus voting rating from the NRA, which has long impeded gun restrictions in Congress but has backed some efforts to make it harder for mentally ill people to purchase weapons.

Among those barred from buying guns are people legally determined to be “mentally defective” and those who have been committed to mental institutions.

South Carolina courts already are required to submit the records under a law passed on the state level after the confrontation involving Boland in 2013.

Cornyn’s bill follows recent shootings that have drawn attention to weaknesses in the background check system. States providing less than that could see grants cut by similar amounts.

He called the law unenforceable and easy to sidestep, noting that a private dealer who failed to do a background check could easily say the gun was stolen or decline to issue a bill of sale.

Texas Senator John Cornyn (R) introduced a bill yesterday entitled the “Mental Health and Safe Communities Act”.

The bill would further obscure the checks and balances of federalism by leveraging federal funding to compel state cooperation with federal processes. “But I think after a certain time, the person should have the opportunity to go back and have it revisited and determine whether those people have received the proper training and the proper mental therapy and they turn out that the problems; the issues they had are taken care of”.

Lower than two weeks in the past, John Russell Houser fired a handgun right into a crowd of film watchers in Lafayette, Louisiana, killing two and wounding 9.

On top of that, many local sheriffs and county commissions say they don’t intend to enforce the new law – and it’s unclear how many gun dealers will even agree to conduct checks for private sellers. Police said Houser killed himself after they confronted him. He introduced the bill after it was discovered that Dylann Roof, who’s charged with killing nine people in a Charleston church, bought the gun while a background check was still being done. That should have blocked his purchase. But wouldn’t that be a preferable argument to blanket federal legislation?

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