There were hopes that the Senate would have a vote yesterday to move along the gun background check bill, but Sen. Joe Manchin acknowledged to CNN that he and Sen. Pat Toomey don't yet have the 60 votes they need to clear the next hurdle.

Never mind the fact that Harry Reid promised an open amendment process so that the gun nuts can try to add all sorts of nonsense to the bill --lots of that stuff might already be included!

My pal Cliff Schecter told me that anything that Alan Gottlieb of the Second Amendment Foundation says is about as credible as the NY Post reporting on the Boston marathon bombing. But I still think it's worth repeating that, speaking in front of a GOP gathering in Portland on Friday, Gottlieb bragged that he and his staff were actually in the room with Manchin and Toomey and helped write the bill.

There’s a million other things in there, it’s a Christmas tree. We just hung a million ornaments on it. We’re taking the background check and making it a pro-gun bill. Unfortunately, some of my colleagues haven’t quite figured it out yet because they weren’t standing in the room writing it. My staff was. I’ll be perfectly candid about it. This will probably break on Monday in the Wall Street Journal. So you're getting a little of “inside baseball.”

Some of the "million ornaments" that Gottlieb claims his staff put in the bill to make it a "pro-gun bill":

It gives protection, if you do go through the background check, you as an individual will now get both civil and criminal liability protection that you don’t have now. If somebody sold a gun to somebody who’s misused it, nobody can sue you, even in a civil court, for damages. That’s great protection that you don’t have right now.

There’s about 10 other important things in there. One of them them, that some of you have read in the newspapers, that a lot of veterans are being disarmed so to speak once they come back from combat in Iraq and Afghanistan and all of a sudden because they were outprocessed and had stress problems, the VA now puts their name into the NICS system they can’t own a gun. This new bill, this background check bill, has a provision in it to eradicate that. Their rights will be restored.

It goes on and on. Traveling across the country. It gives you more protection so that you can take your gun from state to state than you have now.

Another important one, you cannot now legally buy a handgun in a state that you don’t live in. If you’re not a resident of the state you can’t buy a handgun. Under the so-call “background check bill,” you’ll be able to buy a handgun in all 50 states, as long as you buy it from a licensed dealer, you can buy it from anywhere you want.

I certainly hope the senators that are charged with voting on this bill actually read it to make sure that it's more about protecting the people of this nation than giving gun owners more license to kill.

On the other hand, it probably doesn't even matter. If it does get through the Senate, it still has to clear the House. Congressman Alan Grayson was on my show yesterday, and I asked him what he thinks will happen there should the bill make it that far.

His response: "Nothing."

H/t to The Political Carnival for the story.

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