Grassley-Cruz would have fixed this problem. Specifically, it mandated the Department of Justice to conduct an audit of federal agencies to make sure that there are not felony convictions that they haven’t reported to the database. Presumably, had the law passed, it would have caught the Sutherland Springs murderer’s convictions.
Furthermore, when the Sutherland Springs perpetrator filled out his background check form, he lied twice. He checked the box that said he did not have a felony conviction, and he checked the box that said he did not have a domestic violence conviction. Both of those lies were themselves felonies, punishable by up to five years in prison.
Unfortunately, the Department of Justice rarely prosecutes these cases. For example, in 2010, there were over 53,000 felons and fugitives who tried to illegally purchase a firearm; of those, the Obama DOJ prosecuted just 44. Forty-four out of fifty-three thousand.
Grassley-Cruz mandated that these criminals be prosecuted. It created a gun-crime task force at DOJ specifically to prosecute felons or fugitives who try to buy firearms illegally.
Grassley-Cruz came to a vote on the Senate floor, and fifty-three senators voted yes, including nine Democrats—the most bipartisan support of any of the comprehensive measures. So why did Grassley-Cruz not pass into law? Because Harry Reid and the Democrats filibustered it—they demanded sixty votes for it to pass. Even though a majority of Senators voted for it, the Democrats blocked it. (To date, I don’t know of a single reporter who has ever asked a single Democrat why they blocked bipartisan gun-violence legislation that would have made a real difference saving lives.)
Had Democrats not filibustered Grassley-Cruz, there is a very real possibility that the Sutherland Springs shooting never would have happened. The DOJ audit presumably would have caught the shooter’s felony conviction, and, when he lied on the background check, DOJ would have prosecuted him. Which means he would have been in a federal prison cell instead of that beautiful country church murdering twenty-six innocent people.
As with many other issues, on the question of gun control, Democrats have become more and more radicalized. Not that long ago, President Bill Clinton credited congressional Democrats’ 1994 passage of the so-called “assault weapons” ban with Newt Gingrich’s Republican landslide that took over Congress the following year. Clinton likewise considered Al Gore’s support for gun control as the key reason he lost the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush.
There was a time, politically, when Democrats sought to assure rural voters, working-class voters, and other types of voters that they were not plotting to away take their guns. To be sure, there were always Democrats who were open about their hostility to gun rights. In 1995, Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein of California said, “If I had 51 votes in the Senate for, ‘Mr. and Mrs. America, turn in all of your guns,’ I would do it.” That sentiment might work in bright blue California, but many other Democrats from across the country used to think differently.
But that has changed now.
In my U.S. Senate re-election campaign in Texas in 2018, I faced Beto O’Rourke. Beto ended up raising over $80 million. He out-raised our campaign three to one, swamped the state with advertising, and more than doubled Democratic turnout in the state of Texas over what it had been in 2014—from less than two million all the way up to four million. The money differential between our campaign and his was so stark that my campaign had a total of 18 paid campaign staffers, while O’Rourke’s campaign had 805.
Our 2018 campaign ended up being the most expensive Senate race, in terms of hard money, in the history of the U.S. Senate. The last six weeks of the campaign, I went on a bus tour, barnstorming the state and doing fifty rallies and town halls all across Texas. And, thankfully, we turned out 4.2 million voters to defeat Beto’s historic 4 million.
The day that Beto won the Democratic primary, I put out a humorous, satirical song on the radio. It was entitled, “If You’re Gonna Run in Texas, You Can’t be a Liberal Man.” It was set, of course, to the tune of, “If You’re Gonna Play in Texas (You Gotta Have a Fiddle in the Band).” One line of the song said that “Beto wants them open borders, and he wants to take our guns.” PolitiFact, the biased and frequently dishonest journalistic outfit that routinely attacks Republicans and declares liberal bromides to be unassailable fact, rated my statement that Beto “wants to take our guns”—in a satirical song—as objectively “false.”
Well, fast-forward to the 2020 presidential election and, standing on the debate stage as a candidate for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination and trying to energize the far-left activists in his party, Beto O’Rourke declared, “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15s!”
Shortly thereafter, on his campaign website, Beto’s campaign began selling T-shirts emblazoned, “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15.” When that happened, I couldn’t resist tweeting: “Just a reminder, when I said it, PolitiFact (a wholly-owned subsidiary of the DNC) rated ‘Beto wants to take our guns’ as ‘FALSE.’ Maybe they should buy one of his new T-shirts.”
PolitiFact issued an unusually personal response to my tweet, fitfully declaring that they’re not “a wholly-owned subsidiary of the DNC.” As the Bard put it, methinks she doth protest too much. PolitiFact further asserted that O’Rourke had recently “partially changed his position” and that its 2018 fact-check of O’Rourke remained accurate as of the time it was conducted. Of course.
Later in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, well after Beto had dropped out and Joe Biden had won Super Tuesday in March, Biden stood alongside Beto O’Rourke in Dallas and pledged that Beto might well be in charge of gun policy in a Biden presidential administration.
That’s not surprising because Biden’s own views are just as radical. In August 2019, a television interviewer asked Biden the following question: “So, to gun owners out there who say, well, a Biden administration means they’re going
