Maloney Unhinged

Over the past several decades, we’ve always been able to count on certain members of Congress to push senseless anti-gun legislation, no matter what the political climate. A few rabid gun-banners who come to mind are Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y., Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif.

Now, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., seems to be vying for membership into that gun-hater club—at least judging from four very bad pieces of anti-gun legislation she has introduced in just the past month. 

On May 15, Maloney introduced a measure, H.R. 2380, to close the so-called “gun-show loophole”—a feel-good solution to a non-existent problem. In truth, the bill would only burden lawful firearm purchasers, since all licensed gun dealers must already perform background checks when making a sale, whether at their shop or at a gun show. Also, repeated surveys of prison inmates who possessed firearms at the time of their offenses revealed that less than 1 percent acquired their firearms at gun shows.    

Not even a week later, Maloney dropped her next anti-gun bomb. H.R. 2546 would require all gun purchasers to have liability insurance before being “allowed” by the government to buy a firearm. Gun purchasers without such a policy would be subject to a fine of $10,000.

Russell Roberts, an economics fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, toldBankrate: “To me, insurance is just a fancy way to discourage gun ownership by raising the cost of owning a gun. I don't think that's a good idea because not everybody obeys the law. You would raise the cost for law-abiding citizens to own a gun without having any impact on those who illegally own a gun.”

Interestingly, it turns out that Maloney’s motives for the insurance legislation might not be purely her disdain for law-abiding Americans practicing their Second Amendment rights. Data provided by OpenSecrets.org show that PACs and individuals in the insurance industry rank third on Maloney’s donor list (up from fourth in 2012), providing Maloney’s campaign committee with nearly $90,000 for 2013-14. 

Maloney’s longstanding and ongoing battle against peaceable gun owners is something that should outrage us all. The fact that she’s getting paid by those in the insurance industry to introduce such an asinine bill makes the situation all the more disgusting. Not one to rest long on her laurels, Maloney followed up these two outrageous measures with another—this one possibly even worse. Mere weeks after the first two, Maloney teamed up with anti-gun U.S. Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., to mandate that American gun owners use technology that doesn’t even exist.

In another attempt to cram so-called “smart guns” down your throat, the “Handgun Trigger Safety Act,” as they refer to it, calls for all new handguns to be authorized-user-only enabled in five years, and all handguns of any vintage to be retrofitted in 10. “Smart guns,” of course, are an emerging and completely unproven technology. While attempts have been made at various designs, there is no “smart-gun” technology that can currently be fit to every handgun on the market. And no “smart gun” has yet proven itself in the marketplace. 

Finally, Maloney and Markey also worked together to introduce the poorly named “Gun Research Safety Bill,” a plan to give $10 million a year (2016-2021) to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for “gun violence” research. Of course, the CDC is perhaps the most notorious twister of gun statistics anywhere, and should not be allowed to use taxpayer dollars to produce misleading research targeting those very taxpayers’ Second Amendment rights. That’s why Congress outlawed use of taxpayer money for CDC gun studies years ago.