10 Republican Senators Join Democrats on Gun Control Bill

BUCK: We have a reminder — news over the weekend, a reminder — of what tends to happen in the Republican Party, and that is that there are… It’s almost a type, a species of Republican for whom any opportunity to achieve the strange new respect of Democrats for a minute, to get a pat on the head from the editorial board of the New York Times, to get an attaboy or attagirl from CNN… That only lasts about a day, if that.

But it’s worth it even if it means betraying the Republican base, even if it means going along with this moment of heightened emotion over reason, infringing upon rights, and allowing the left what they want, which is to harass people. I’m speaking of there had to be, of course, of the bipartisan — and I think it is technically correct to call this one somewhat bipartisan — Senate framework for gun control that was achieved over the weekend. There are 10 Republicans in support of this.

Now, before we get into those Republicans, what this includes is mostly about mental health, background checks for 18 to 21 years olds, I think it says. Red flag laws. That’s a big one. Something called “the boyfriend loophole” is also in this. No semiautomatic weapons ban, no 21 minimum age, no magazine ban. So they didn’t do any of that. The legislation, like I said, wouldn’t ban assault weapons.

So this is going to do very little, if anything. I think it’s fair to say it probably would do nothing other than spend money on programs for which there is no accountability and no reasonable belief that it will really do very much. In fact, it does so little that you wonder, how could anyone think…? By the way, here you go: “Senators have agreed to close the boyfriend loophole,” this is what I was looking for, “by prohibiting someone from obtaining a firearm if they were convicted of domestic violence related to a dating partner or were the subject of a restraining order.”

That’s interesting. Clay, here are the 10 Senate Republicans who are going to go along with this. So this is gonna get done. I mean, this is gonna get signed into law. Tillis, Blunt, Burr, Cassidy, Collins, Graham, Portman, Romney (no surprise there), Toomey, and Cornyn of Texas — which, I think some people are saying, “Oh, the other senator from Texas is going along with this.” What do you make of it all?

CLAY: I think it is a calculated attempt to ensure that guns aren’t a distraction. This is being charitable, right? I think this is a calculated attempt to effectively take guns off the table for the midterm while not really doing anything of a substantive nature. So my analysis on… They were saying the first hour — and I think you’re a hundred percent right about this — Democrats now for the midterms have to throw up distractions.

Things that are going to be bright, shiny objects in an effort to distract from the cold, hard reality of what’s going on — the border, the murder rate, inflation, stocks collapse being, the situation in Ukraine — which, by the way, to your credit, Buck, you said we’re widely under-analyzing what Russia is going to be capable of, and now Russia is got back control, it seems like, very much in the eastern part of Ukraine.

BUCK: They’re gaining day in and day out.

CLAY: It seems that we are going to have to throw billions and billions of dollars more into this money pit war that we’re ostensibly not a part of but we are kinda are a part of now, in a proxy sense. So, they don’t want any of that. So, they’ve got Trump, they’ve got guns, and they’ve got abortion. And I think they are going to do everything that they can on Trump, guns, and abortion. To me, I think this takes guns out of the equation.

Because I think the storyline now, what Democrats are gonna want to sell is, this is a massive win even though substantively it’s not very much different as you mentioned and basically would have had no impact on almost any of these shootings, right? And so I think it takes guns off the table, abortion sooner or later — and we should talk about the continued failure of John Roberts to put out this decision.

Even though some of the members of his court are legitimately being potentially assassinated right now dealing with that threat — and the Trump thing, where I really do think the more you look at this January 6th event, they’re trying to bully and bully Merrick Garland until he throws him under the bus. So, I think this takes guns off the table, charitably, if you want to analyze it from that perspective, purely political within the based on an analysis of Second Amendment juris or anything like that.

BUCK: So this bill would include — I mentioned this at the top, ran through whole bunch of things — expanded background check for people under 21 who want to purchase a gun. The background check currently only deals with after-age 18 behavior. So what this would do is if you want to buy a gun your juvenile records would also be subject to scrutiny here.

CLAY: Which, by the way — let me just say this — seems like a mess because the idea is when you become an adult, your juvenile record does not follow you. So here in this scenario, you have the juvenile record following you into adulthood, just FYI. Sorry to cut you off. But I do think that flies in the face of the concept of a juvenile record disappearing in general.

BUCK: And so you look at this and then the expansion of money for mental health initiatives. I’ll just remind everyone, “mental health initiative” always sounds like — ‘cause this country is actually in the midst of a mental health crisis similarly to… We talk about a national crime wave? We have a mental health wave or a mental health disturbance wave I think is largely attributable to the covid lockdowns and all the madness of that whole phenomenon, completely unnecessary, inhumane and disgraceful that they made everyone go through this.

But we spend almost a billion dollars on a mental health initiatives in New York City alone, for example, that was handed to Bill de Blasio’s unelected wife when he was the mayor, it was $800 million they spent, and still no one really understands where the money went. It feels like $800 million for a city budget — we’re not talking any federal now, $800 million for a city, I feel like — shouldn’t just get lost in the couch cushions, but apparently it did.

So mental health, yeah, it should be addressed, but that’s a little bit like saying kindness or manners should be addressed. You need to be really specific about what you think is gonna work here. And then you also have to remind everybody, or we’re all reminded, perhaps, of the red flag law component here. Does anyone really think that the same system that masked us up forcefully for two years — they thought we were crazy ’cause we didn’t want to do that, they were crazy for making everyone do that.

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: The same system that’s firing members of the military because they don’t want to get a shot that they do not need that will not protect them unless they want to keep getting a shot about every three months and even then the protection’s not so good. We’re gonna trust that system not to abuse? Red flag laws, in concept, I understand why people would support them. I understand the concept behind them. In implementation, it just feels like this is likely to be abused in jurisdictions that are anti-gun and this will be used as a tool against people — whether it’s veterans who have PTSD and others — to prevent them from enjoying their Second Amendment rights.

CLAY: And, by the way, this situation in Uvalde continues to look more and more like an utterly incompetent police response. And so I still want more of the details about this police response. We know the police were in the building two minutes after the shooter. We know that they exchanged fire with the shooter shortly after he gets inside. I still find the entire concept of how to make schools safer, we immediately pivoted off of that, right?

You and I had that conversation. I talked about what goes on in my kids’ elementary school, the armed security that’s there, the fact that there’s only one entrance in theory to the school, all of these things. I feel like we totally missed the ball in terms of analyzing how to keep schools as safe as possible, and my criticism is, if we’re going to spending money, I would rather be spending money on police officers in schools.

If we got $40 billion for Ukraine, how can we not protect the kids in this school? And what went wrong in Uvalde? Does it feel to you like the story quickly — I’m not surprised by it, but very rapidly — moved into we need gun control and not actually addressing what happened in Uvalde? Because that was just total failure by the police there.

BUCK: Here is Senator Chris Murphy who has been one of the guys pushing this the most from Connecticut on this gun — this bipartisan gun bill that is likely to pass soon.

BUCK: Can I just…? A lot of things there. First of all, don’t let it slip past anybody that he said “setting us up for future success.” More gun control legislation. That’s what he means.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: This is not like, “Okay, Republicans…” This is why, Clay, I understand what you were saying from a purely political perspective, he takes some of the heat out of it, but from a, “What is the real plan of the left?” It’s incremental gun grabbing always, forever, until they go full Trudeau and say you’re not even allowed to — which we can get to in a few minutes — use a gun to defend yourself, they will not be happy.

They will keep pushing for more on this, but also what he says there about gonna save thousands of lives? It’s just absurd. It’s just absurd. And even beyond that on what they call “the boyfriend loophole,” for example, okay, sometimes people get joint restraining orders against each other. This is a thing that can often happen. There are due process concerns with someone can now say…

What happens if someone has a really nasty breakup and they say, “You know what? I’m gonna get a restraining order against my ex-husband or my ex-wife so that I can get their guns taken away, ’cause I know it’s really important to them”? How do they adjudicate this? I assume there might be some court process, but they probably take the guns, and then you have to try to get them back.

CLAY: Yeah, I think it’s going to be messy, and you also know he slid in there suicide. You know what is one of the one culprits of suicides of late? The lockdowns. Right? The overall suicide rate and mental health issues in this country have skyrocketed since Democrats have shutdown the country and kept it shut down. So the idea based on this law that thousands of lives are gonna be saved I think is certainly a lie.

And this goes to the point that we made on this program, which is if you truly wanted to save lives — if your truly goal is to reduce gun violence — you would do two things: Put more police officers on the streets and keep the ones from retiring — which has turned into a monster issue — and second, you would put criminals hand bars. This isn’t focused on either of those.

BUCK: There have been 1500 retirements — early retirements in many cases — from the NYPD alone.

CLAY: It’s a hundred percent a monster issue.