Mayors Working to Close Loophole That Lets Crazys Buy Guns

I've historically been neutral at best on gun laws. Coming from Texas it's such a cultural loser with so many voters who ought to be voting Democrat that I haven't even tried to fight that fight.
That has changed since I got older, became a parent and started having to go to so many funerals. 
There's no reason we need to allow crazy people to own guns. A group of Mayors has launched a new initiative to close the biggest loopholes in the background checks law. Here's NYC Mayor Bloomberg at Huff Po:

Today, I joined Martin Luther King III and survivors, family members and friends of the victims of the shootings in Tucson, Virginia Tech, and Columbine and other incidents of gun violence that happen every day but never make the headlines. We launched a national campaign urging Congress to take two simple but critical steps to fix our nation's broken background check system: 1) fulfill the letter of the historic 1968 gun law and ensure that all names of people prohibited from buying a gun are in the background check system; and 2) fulfill the intent of the historic 1968 gun law by subjecting every gun sale to a background check. Add your voice now at www.fixgunchecks.org.

 
Mayor Bloomberg's speech is in the full entry.
Here's Cliff Schecter explaining some of the background behind our insane approach to gun laws:


There is simply no understanding the prevalence of gun violence in America - as evidenced by the recent attempted assassination of a congresswoman during a mass shooting - without discussing the nefarious role played by the National Rifle Association (NRA).
Once an organisation primarily concerned with the education and training of sportsmen, in a coup that came to be known as the Cincinnati Revolt in 1977, hardliners took over the leadership and believed that any gun regulation would take us down a slippery slope to Khmer Rougism.
In the years since, unlike the US in the wake of the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy - or for that matter Australia after the Port Arthur Massacre - the response to senseless gun violence has been to discuss everything from the rhetoric on our airwaves to the weather outside.
But any public conversations regarding restricting who has access to guns has been considered verboten (although, thankfully, this time some cracks are beginning to show).
This is largely because the NRA's duping its own members, which we'll discuss below, and coming to the realisation that the real money was in actually protecting the rights of gun manufacturers, which we'll discuss in Part II of this series.

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