Chuck Schumer has been trying to work out a bipartisan agreement on universal background checks for gun purchases with Tom Coburn, but negotiations between the senators have stalled over whether private sellers should be required to keep receipts of gun sales. Dealers already have to keep such documents, but Coburn insists there “absolutely will not be record keeping on legitimate, law-abiding gun owners in this country.” “They’ve tried to mix the dealer records with the background checks and create the bogeyman of a national registry,” James Pasco, the executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, tells Politico. “To somehow suggest that that is a step toward a registry is at variance with common sense.” Now the NRA is challenging common sense even more explicitly in a new ad that claims Schumer accidentally revealed his secret plot to take Americans’ guns in a live TV interview.
The commercial shows Schumer stating during a January 30 hearing that creating a federal gun registry “is already illegal and it will be repeated as illegal in our law. Then in a TV interview on February 13, the senator refers to a proposal “that I have been pushing, which is universal registration.” The music swells and the commercial’s narrator declares, “So when gun owners hear ‘universal background checks,’ we know it means ‘universal registration.’”
Schumer’s spokesman, Max Young, tells the Daily News that the senator has consistently opposed creating a gun registry, and the term “universal registration” was just a slip of the tongue. “The NRA knowingly used a clip, out of context, where he misspoke,” Young said. “He used the correct phrase — universal background checks — several other times in the interview.”
That may be true, but considering that the NRA has recently shared a made-up memory of the terrible looting after Hurricane Sandy and complained about an imaginary insult in President Obama’s inaugural address, Schumer should just be happy that the gun group is complaining about words he actually said.
