How did gun sales trump public safety?

“My friends know that I’m a pretty strong constitutional conservative,” wrote one of my Facebook friends last Wednesday afternoon, “But I’m not sure how a law that would have strictly forbidden a national gun registry is supposed to lead to a national gun registry. Feeling lost,” he concluded with a sad-faced emoticon.

He was referring to the fact that despite 90 percent of Americans supporting legislation to institute criminal background checks for all gun purchases, including online and at gun shows, the U.S. Senate was unable to pass it.

How did this happen?

Well for one thing, gun lobbying groups and right-wing pundits smeared the proposed legislation. To manipulate individual gun owners, and more importantly Congress, to protect all gun sales, they misrepresented the bill as mandating a national gun registry.

As the New York Times reported: “The National Rifle Association mobilized members to blanket the Senate with phone calls, e-mails and letters.”

On Fox News, Eric Bolling argued the legislation mandated a national gun registry, even though it specifically strengthened an existing law outlawing such a registry. And on his April 10 program, right wing radio announcer Mark Levin implied the law would create a database of gun owners and perhaps even lead to genocide. Another Fox News contributor, Erick Erickson, tweeted liberal doctors might one day diagnose Christians as “too crazy for gun ownership.”

Where do they get this stuff? They make it up to get credulous voters to advocate for their point of view. And apparently it works on Congress people, too.

As The New York Times article noted, our Senator Charles E. Grassley contributed nothing more to the debate than the tired old saw: “Criminals do not submit to background checks now. They will not submit to expanded background checks.”

Yet a recent NBC news report noted: “The numbers show that background checks do keep guns out of the hands of at least some people who are not supposed to have them. Nearly 1.8 million applications for firearm transfers or permits were denied between the passage of the [Brady Handgun Violence Protection Act] law in March 1994 and December 2008, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The FBI and state law enforcement denied firearm purchases to 153,000 people in 2010 alone, the most recent year for which data is available.”

And another recent New York Times story, titled “Seeking Gun or Selling One, Web is Land of Few Rules,” reported: “A 2011 undercover investigation by the City of New York examined private party gun sellers on a range of Web sites, including Armslist, to see if they would sell guns to someone who said that they probably could not pass a background check. (Federal law bars sales to any person the seller has reason to believe is prohibited from purchasing firearms). Investigators found seventy-seven of 125 online sellers agreed to sell the weapons anyway.”

Ultimately, those sellers chose the money from the sale over the safety of the public. Profit before people.

If that’s what we value, we really are lost.