The US Senate treated foolish, ill-considered gun control legislation much as Eliot Ness treated Frank Nitti: both are currently waiting in the car. And good riddance.

To hear those on the Left tell it, the Senate’s failure to pass gun control legislation yesterday was an act of cowardice. Every single media outlet screeched in horror the received wisdom: Failure to pass gun control is cowardice!

President Obama took defeat as he usually does, by holding an incoherent press conference in the Rose Garden, flanked by Victims of the Day, careening wildly from incoherent rage to blaming everyone but himself to moral preening to questioning the beliefs of others.  Par for the course, really.

Maybe if the Left would take a collective deep breath, put on their big boy pants and quit their ill-informed bitching long enough to hear themselves think, they may come to a different conclusion.

Here are some possible conclusions from which Leftists may choose, assuming as is likely that they can’t stop sputtering long enough to form a coherent thought.

• The Senate functioned exactly as the Senate should.  As Jefferson and Washington apocryphally discussed, the Senate was to be function as the cool voice of reason, tempering the hot-headed House. Here, the Democrats were so Hell bent on using emotions rubbed raw to enact gun control, they skipped the House altogether, gambling that the Senate would cave to the endless drumbeat of media wisdom and the parade of tragic victims of gun violence. No dice. In voting down all gun control legislation, the Senate provided the nation a cooling off period during which it can step back and rationally consider what purpose it seeks (if any) in further gun control legislation, then logically crafting any such legislative proposal to meet that end.
• Representative democracy worked. Even assuming the president’s misleading statement that “90 percent of Americans favor background checks,”* it doesn’t matter one iota.  All that matters for each Senator is what he believes his constituents believe. The four** Democrat Senators voting against the Manchin-Toomey Amendment (widely thought to be most likely to succeed) were from the following states: Alaska (Begich), Arkansas (Pryor), Montana (Baucus) and North Dakota (Heitkamp). Each of these states is largely rural, conservative without regard to party and strongly supportive of gun rights. And three of these four Senators (Baucus, Begich and Pryor) are up for reelection in 2014. A gun control vote would kill their reelection hopes. Whether for nobly representing their constituencies or for ignobly preserving their jobs, these four Democrat Senators did their jobs.***
• The presiding Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) knew Democrats didn’t have the votes to invoke cloture on the amendments. Without invoking cloture, a vote to end debate on an amendment kills the amendment.  Thus, the 60 vote threshold for passage. However, on a failed cloture vote, the Senate’s majority leader may call the failed cloture vote at any future time, allowing him sufficient time to gin up or purchase the required votes.  This Senate publication does a fine job of explaining the cloture process, if you’re so inclined.
• Permitting Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) to be the face of gun control guaranteed a “go to the mattresses” response from gun rights organization. Almost as soon as the last tiny corpse had been carted out of Sandy Hook Elementary School, Sen. Feinstein set to blaming guns for every tragedy that ever happened anywhere and braying for revival of her utterly ineffective and subsequently revoked Assault Weapons Ban.  To say gun rights advocates loathe Sen. Feinstein would be to put it mildly.  Yet President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Reid allowed Sen. Feinstein to rant and rave about the need to disarm America, and to do so in the most intrusive and unconstitutional ways imaginable.  Maybe if Democrats had let Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) be the front man for gun control in the first instance, they’d have managed to get something done.
• Using parents of slaughtered innocents as advocates, again almost from the moment the last small body was interred, was public relations stupidity. ‘Puter’s a parent, and he knows that if a deranged man-child had burst into his kid’s school and gunned him down, ‘Puter’d be looking for vengeance.  That is, after ‘Puter wept out all the tears he was capable of weeping. And that’s how ‘Puter views these parents.  These folks are deeply grieving and want some good — any good at all — to be done in the name of their children, so they will not have died in vain. It’s understandable. But Democrats used these mourning parents to push a disarmament agenda so extreme that not one single portion of it passed in a majority Democrat Senate.  Overreach proved Democrats’ gun control nirvana’s undoing.

Despite what the Left would have you believe, the Senate did America a favor.  The Senate treated gun control legislation the way it should’ve treated ObamaCare, slowing it down until cooler heads prevailed.  Frankly, the reaction of the Left, both among the public and the media, proves ‘Puter’s point.  Liberals are squealing like stuck Irish pigs that SOMETHING MUST BE DONE! Well, maybe something was done. Something more important than ramrodding through legislation that wouldn’t have prevented the tragedy invoked to smooth its passage.

Something like preserving the birthright of all Americans, enshrined in and guaranteed by the United States Constitution.

*’Puter believes Mr. Obama refers to this CNN/ORC poll showing that 89% of Americans surveyed favor undefined “expanded background checks.” What Mr. Obama omits to tell Americans is that a clear majority (greater than his election margin, by the way) of 55% believe that gun registration is a bad idea, and 66% believe that if the government registered guns, the government would eventually use that information to remove guns from gun owners. So, it is exceedingly unlikely that “90% of Americans” favored the Manchin-Toomey amendment on background checks for one or another of the noted reasons. ‘Puter’s betting that a majority of Americans think the background checks we have now are just fine, but maybe could use some tinkering. ‘Puter’s thinking somewhere in the neighborhood of 54%, which, coincidentally, is the percentage of Senators that voted Manchin-Toomey down.

**There were actually five Democrat Senators voting against the Manchin-Toomey Amendment. Harry Reid (D-NV) was the fifth “no” vote, but likely voted no: (1) as a procedural move which would allow him to revive the amendment at a later date; and (2) it allows Reid to claim his is pro-Second Amendment to garner NRA support, which organization almost singlehandedly reelected him last time.

***’Puter is going to nut-punch the next talking head, politician or person who is so stupid as to say, “A clear majority wants it so we should have it! To do otherwise is undemocratic and unAmerican!” No, tinfoil hat brigade, it’s none of those things. It’s uniquely American and fully in keeping with our democratic traditions.  If you’d like to start the “a majority thinks it’s a good idea, so let’s enact it” legal standard, then we can take a look at severely limiting abortion rights, which a clear majority disfavors. We can also enact a complete confiscation of all the totally bitchin’ stuff rich liberal Hollywood types have to redistribute to talentless wannabes who think they deserve it more. We can probably even enact legislation banning nightmares, floods, the tides and even death. ‘Puter’s fairly certain he could get a clear majority of Americans to agree to anything, if he phrased it properly, provided it didn’t affect the majority at all. You know, sort of like Obama’s “fair share” plan on taxes, with “fair share” to be defined at some later date.  Trust Obama. He’ll take care of you.

'Puter

Always right, unless he isn’t, the infallible Ghettoputer F. X. Gormogons claims to be an in-law of the Volgi, although no one really believes this.

’Puter carefully follows economic and financial trends, legal affairs, and serves as the Gormogons’ financial and legal advisor. He successfully defended us against a lawsuit from a liquor distributor worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid deliveries of bootleg shandies.

The Geep has an IQ so high it is untestable and attempts to measure it have resulted in dangerously unstable results as well as injuries to researchers. Coincidentally, he publishes intelligence tests as a side gig.

His sarcasm is so highly developed it borders on the psychic, and he is often able to insult a person even before meeting them. ’Puter enjoys hunting small game with 000 slugs and punt guns, correcting homilies in real time at Mass, and undermining unions. ’Puter likes to wear a hockey mask and carry an axe into public campgrounds, where he bursts into people’s tents and screams. As you might expect, he has been shot several times but remains completely undeterred.

He assures us that his obsessive fawning over news stories involving women teachers sleeping with young students is not Freudian in any way, although he admits something similar once happened to him. Uniquely, ’Puter is unable to speak, read, or write Russian, but he is able to sing it fluently.

Geep joined the order in the mid-1980s. He arrived at the Castle door with dozens of steamer trunks and an inarticulate hissing creature of astonishingly low intelligence he calls “Sleestak.” Ghettoputer appears to make his wishes known to Sleestak, although no one is sure whether this is the result of complex sign language, expert body posture reading, or simply beating Sleestak with a rubber mallet.

‘Puter suggests the Czar suck it.