(Via Drudge) Well, isn’t that special of them. From the Washington Post:

The White House is weighing a far broader and more comprehensive approach to curbing the nation’s gun violence than simply reinstating an expired ban on assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition, according to multiple people involved in the administration’s discussions.

A working group led by Vice President Biden is seriously considering measures backed by key law enforcement leaders that would require universal background checks for firearm buyers, track the movement and sale of weapons through a national database, strengthen mental health checks, and stiffen penalties for carrying guns near schools or giving them to minors, the sources said.

…None of which would have stopped the Newtown atrocity. The shooter stole the guns from his mother, who passed a background check (Connecticut has that); the guns, being stolen and used rather than resold, would have been effectively invisible to a hypothetical database; the guns were not in fact owned by a mentally unstable, violent person who used them to murder children (they were stolen by somebody who used them for that); and penalties for possession of firearms around schools or by minors obviously had no effect on the shooter (who was, by the way, a legal adult).

Now, I’m not going to tell you that Nothing Will Ever Pass. Politics doesn’t work like that. What I am saying is that initiatives like this reveal pretty comprehensively that the Democratic party is, at bottom, uncomfortable on an institutional level with the very concept of guns. That this tracks pretty well with the march of the New Left through the Democratic party’s institutions is no accident. In 2013 we are going to see the New Left put lots of pressure on recalcitrant Democratic politicians to renounce their affiliation to the basic civil right of self-defense; and while I do not expect Congress to pass any serious legislation along those lines while the GOP controls the House, we are going to see some notable defections among the Democrats. If Obamacare taught us nothing else, it taught us that a Democratic politician is a Democrat first, a Democrat second – and, say, pro-life a distant third.

So I recommend that nobody trust anybody in the Democratic party to keep from mucking with the Second Amendment. They’re a weak reed that will break in your hand. Simple as that.

Moe Lane (crosspost)