WATCH: Paul Ryan BLASTS ‘sit-in’ as Dems trying to raise money off of Orlando tragedy

Paul Ryan hammered Democrats today, pointing out their gun-control proposal was raised in committee and rejected in committee on a bipartisan basis.

Further, Ryan says if the Democrats want a vote on the floor, all they need is 218 signatures from members of Congress and they can get one.

But he says they aren’t staging this sit-in because they want a vote, he says they are doing this to fundraise off of a tragedy. He even shows the emails they are sending out.

Watch:

 
Ryan is right. This is nothing more than an election year publicity stunt.

Even the very liberal Gawker knows this is nothing more than political theater:

After Democrats in the Senate staged a filibuster in support of gun control measures, their colleagues in the House have begun a “sit-in” aimed at embarrassing Republicans into allowing a vote on a measure that would restrict the ability of suspected terrorists to legally buy guns. The move is fantastic political theater. It’s also a tremendous waste of popular support and activist energy in support of a measure that isn’t just ineffective but also actively offensive.

The Democratic proposal has been catch-phrased and hashtagged as “no fly, no buy,” because it would prevent people who end up on government terrorism watchlists, including the “no fly list,” from purchasing firearms. This would do little to reduce gun violence, but it would add an additional layer of surveillance and government scrutiny to a particular class of people.

That certainly sounds like a solid principle on which to take a stand—terrorists shouldn’t have AR-15s! Meanwhile, most gun deaths in the United States are not caused by suspected terrorists armed with military-style semi-automatic rifles. The vast majority of gun deaths—suicides as well as homicides—are caused by handguns, and the majority of people firing those guns are not suspected terrorists (which invariably refers, in contemporary discourse, to Muslims, and no other groups or individuals dedicated to political violence).

The no-fly list is a civil rights disaster by every conceivable standard. It is secret, it disproportionately affects Arab-Americans, it is error-prone, there is no due process or effective recourse for people placed on the list, and it constantly and relentlessly expands. As of 2014, the government had a master watchlist of 680,000 people, forty percent of whom had “no recognized terrorist group affiliation.” This is both an absurdly large number of people to arbitrarily target in gun control legislation, and far, far too few to have any meaningful effect on actual gun ownership, let alone gun violence.

Perhaps such a bill makes political sense as a sort of desperate attempt to get something through a conservative-dominated Congress. But if it is, as it appears to be, more of an effort to highlight the unpopular extremism of Republicans on gun issues, it is a stupid and counterproductive hill to theatrically die on.

When Democrats have lost Gawker….you know it’s bad.


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