Top Democrat Senator Dashes His Party’s Push For Gun Control By Opposing Recently Passed House Bills

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) came out against his party’s push for gun control this week, saying that he does not support bills that were recently passed in the House.

“What the House passed? Not at all,” Manchin said, according to The Hill.

“I come from a gun culture. I’m a law-abiding gun owner,” Manchin said, adding that he supports background checks on commercial transactions because the seller in that case does not know the buyer.

“If I know a person, no,” Manchin added.

The push comes after a man, who was born in Syria, shot and killed 10 people at a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, this week. Democrats seized on the tragedy to both push their far-left gun control agenda and to distract from the crisis that has unfolded on the southern border under President Joe Biden, which has dominated national headlines for weeks.

Democrats have come out and pushed fringe ideas like gun bans to more modest, yet still problematic ideas, like universal background checks. Democrats seem uninterested in the fact that Colorado has universal background checks, which did not stop the tragedy from happening.

Leah Libresco, a former researcher at FiveThirtyEight, was a proponent of all the far-left gun control measures that Democrats champion—gun bans, restricting suppressors, limiting magazine sizes, among others—until she and her colleagues spent three months analyzing all the gun deaths in the U.S. per year.

Libresco wrote the following at The Washington Post about what her research found:

• “We looked at what interventions might have saved those people, and the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence. The best ideas left standing were narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns.”
• “I researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain and Australia and concluded that they didn’t prove much about what America’s policy should be. Neither nation experienced drops in mass shootings or other gun related-crime that could be attributed to their buybacks and bans. Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress. And in both Australia and Britain, the gun restrictions had an ambiguous effect on other gun-related crimes or deaths.”
• “As my co-workers and I kept looking at the data, it seemed less and less clear that one broad gun-control restriction could make a big difference. Two-thirds of gun deaths in the United States every year are suicides. Almost no proposed restriction would make it meaningfully harder for people with guns on hand to use them.”
• “By the time we published our project, I didn’t believe in many of the interventions I’d heard politicians tout. I was still anti-gun, at least from the point of view of most gun owners, and I don’t want a gun in my home, as I think the risk outweighs the benefits. But I can’t endorse policies whose only selling point is that gun owners hate them. Policies that often seem as if they were drafted by people who have encountered guns only as a figure in a briefing book or an image on the news.”

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