Alas, there is peril ahead. Why? Because today’s “exemption” is tomorrow’s “loophole.” No sooner will the glorious presidential ink have dried on that abject page, than those provisions that were sold a few days earlier as commonsense exemptions — the product of “bipartisan compromise” and other media-tested platitudes — will become structural problems, ripe for “standardizing.” Sure, Congress wouldn’t be so gauche as to include A or B or C in their bill today. But have no doubt: Within a few weeks of the bill’s passage, the eerie progressive silence that has marked this tortured process will be broken, and when it is, legions of prominent gun controllers will take to their feet in order to argue that it makes “no sense” for there to be “exemptions” to the almost universal background-check system.They will cynically inquire as to whether keeping these loopholes open for the “industry” is more important than the lives of children, and they will profess that the existing system simply “can’t work” without them. Studies will be commissioned to demonstrate that tying off these “loose ends” is all that stands between the United States and broad sunlit uplands. And, while demonstrating not only that they don’t know the slightest thing about guns but that they don’t care that they don’t, ThinkProgress and Talking Points Memo and Salon will smirk and make oh-so-smug jokes about “black helicopters” and militias. After all, we already regulate commercial sales, Internet sales, and gun shows, right? This is just a baby step — nothing to worry about, wingnuts.
This one appears to be a refreshingly statesmanlike approach to finding common ground and crafting something that is truly beneficial for the American people. But it could well turn out to be yet another stark lesson in a time-tested truth: There is no compromising with Freedom-Haters.
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