VSSA Stands With NRA in Opposing Schumer/Manchin/Toomey Background Check Deal

While we have not seen the final language, we do know the framework of the agreement announced yesterday by Senator's Toomey and Manchin. And it's telling that Toomey's support was premised on him not having to appear with Chucky Schumer.  With that framework, the NRA made their position clear to senators yesterday:

"In addition, the NRA will oppose any amendments offered to S. 649 that restrict fundamental Second Amendment freedoms; including, but not limited to, proposals that would ban commonly and lawfully owned firearms and magazines or criminalize the private transfer of firearms through an expansion of background checks," Cox writes. "This includes the misguided 'compromise' proposal drafted by Senators Joe Manchin, Pat Toomey and Chuck Schumer."

VSSA stands with NRA in opposing S.649, including the Schumer/Manchin/Toomey background check amendment.  As Charles Cook noted on National Review Online yesterday, even if we take them at their word that the "compromise " includes supposed "exemptions" for in-person private transfers and that it “lets” family members lend or gift one of there their firearms without inviting felonious consequences, and that it doesn't make us felons for allowing our friends to shoot our guns on our private property, today's exemption is tomorrow's loophole:

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.

And Heritage had this to say:

Americans are tired of backroom deals.  Legislation drafted behind closed doors and rushed to the Senate floor has no place in our political system.  We expect this type of deal making from Joe Manchin and also from Chuck Schumer, who supports the “universal registration” of firearms.  However, we expect more from Pat Toomey and, more importantly, so do his constituents.

The debate begins today and may last for weeks.  Keep up the contact with Warner and Kaine, but especially Warner.  We will now see if he was truely with us, or if it was just a marriage of convenience on his part based on the fact that when he was Governor, the General Assembly never gave him an anti-rights bill that he could have signed, nor a pro-rights bill that was so pro-rights that he simply could not approve it.