Gun owner background checks DOA

I am stupefied. According to the New York Times, expanded background checks for gun sales is an all-but-dead idea in the Senate. (The headline, for some reason, is that Harry Reid will vote for an assault weapons ban.)

I thought that expanded background checks were the least we could all agree was necessary. Really. What is the fucking harm in checking who can buy a machine whose only purpose is to kill?

What the fuck is the matter with those of you who are opposed to such checks? And I'm not (just) talking to the senators who are opposed: I'm talking to those of you who have sided with the increasingly psychotic N.R.A.

What the fuck is your problem with wanting to know whether the person buying a device whose only purpose is to kill is possibly unfit to own that device?

What paranoid delusional dystopia are you imagining could come about from a background check, for Christ's sake?

And oh, by the way, where the fuck is your concern with the potential victims of gun violence?

I could see some merit in objections to an "assault weapons" ban, "what is an assault weapon?" being the thorniest and most salient objection. But what the fuck is the objection to a background check, especially after Manchin and Toomey went out of their way to remove the much-dreaded national registry of gun owners?

Not that the likely defeat of expanded background checks is the worst that might come out of the fiasco that is "gun control" (ha!) legislation debate in D.C. Oh, no:

... Republicans, increasingly confident that they will be able to sustain a filibuster on expanded background checks, have turned their attention to their own priorities, especially a conceal-and-carry measure being drafted by Senator John Cornyn of Texas.

Under that measure, any state with a conceal-and-carry rule would have to recognize the permit of any other state. Only Illinois and Washington, D.C., prohibit concealed weapons.

...

Advocates see no difference between that rule and regulations that make each state recognize driver’s licenses from all other states, and it will almost certainly be backed by a number of Democrats.

It would be the most tragic of black ironies if any "gun control" (increasingly embittered "ha!") legislation coming out of this Congressional session actually was more permissive, and deferential to the fanatical N.R.A., than existing law. Yet that's the way things are shaping up.

Color me disgusted.

Fuck all y'all who oppose tightening up background checks. And fuck all y'all who are in favor of expanded concealed-carry legislation. You are fucking over me and everybody else who just want greater sanity and an evolution away from the mythologized ideal of the movie Western, where everybody is packing and everybody is his own law.

[UPDATE: It's official, according to the Times: as of 4:33 PM ET, "Senate Rejects Bipartisan Amendment to Expand Gun Background Checks".]