By Maria Heil,
Contributing Editor

This article will be in the May/June issue, but, the way things work, I am writing this in mid-March. As I am writing this, it is snowing, so it's a little hard to fast-forward my brain to late Spring/early Summer. I'm longing to be digging in my garden, planting the various vegetables and harvesting the lettuce and radishes early on. Oh, and the strawberries! I really look forward to the strawberries. By the time you read this, I hope I'm up to my eyeballs in strawberries and early season garden vegetablesbut for now I'll have to concentrate on the gun issue.

In early March the Senate considered S-1805, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. This bill would prohibit civil liability actions from being brought or continued against manufacturers, distributors, dealers, or importers of firearms or ammunition for damages resulting from the misuse of their products by others. In other words, it would stop the Brady Campaign (aka Sarah's gang) from bringing new lawsuits or continuing their lawsuits against legal manufacturers of a legal product. Sarah's gang wants to have these legal manufacturers and dealers held liable for the acts of criminals!

The way things work is that there is a crime committed with a firearm, and it becomes a high profile case, meaning it gets a fair amount of press coverage because someone got killed. Sarah's gang then swings into action. They entrench themselves with the grieving family and convince them that it was the gun and the gun manufacturers and dealers that were responsible for the death of their loved one. Never mind that the punk who pulled the trigger probably was high, or had a rap sheet going back to the 6th grade!

No, according to Sarah's gang, it's the gun manufacturers who are to blame. If only they could bankrupt the manufacturers, then there would be no more guns. Additionally, the criminal has no money, so why bother suing him? It's the gun manufacturers who have all the money, they are all as greedy as the CEOs who ran Enron. So, Sarah's gang is following the money. Heaven forbid that anyone should follow their money!

I would love to see someone sue Sarah's gang for being instrumental in getting guns banned from a community. Obviously, someone who could not defend themselves because they did not have a gun would really shake things up, but that's not the way things work.

Anyway, back to S-1805, the last few days in February and the first few in March, the bill was being debated on the floor of the Senate. It was a pretty hot debate, which included all the posturing of the gun-grabbers.

On Tuesday, Mar. 2, the hourly news report said that the Senate had passed the Assault Weapons Ban Extension. (The original AWB is scheduled to expire on Sept. 13th of this year.) I was floored! How had I missed that bill? No way I could have missed that. My husband called me and was livid. I got a call about this from a radio show; the host was livid as well. I think most gunowners were livid, especially since they remembered the President stating that if an AWB Extension made it to his desk, he would sign it. The Internet had AWB information flying all over the world.

Of course, Sarah's gang was thrilled and lauded it on their website.

Well, once I got home and on my computer, I was able to see that the AWB Extension was not a stand-alone bill, it was an amendment to S-1805. This was an attempt by the gun grabbers to make the bill detestable to both sides of the issue. S-1805 went down in flames8 yeas and 90 nays.

Of course, this too was widely reported. Early in the day the partisan media was reporting that the AWB Extension had passed, then in the late afternoon they were reporting that the bill to protect gun manufacturers had been overwhelmingly defeated. It sounded like a bad day for gunowners.

Well, now, let me tell you how things work.

The House version of the bill (H.R. 1036) had passed without any amendments. If the Senate had passed their version, but with amendments, the bills would have had to go into a joint committee to hammer out the differences. So, even with the amendments to the Senate version, things still were not a done deal.

The AWB Extension was an amendment to S-1805, when the bill was killed, so was the amendment. Did anyone hear that little detail in the partisan media? I certainly did not.

Well, if you looked at the Brady website, you would have thought that they had won the day. They had up there that the AWB Extension had passed the Senate, and that the Senate voted down immunity for the gun industry.

Well, in actuality, the gun grabbers lost! Sure the Senate had voted to add that AWB Extension to the bill, but I'm sure many of those votes were "look what I did" votes.

At the end of the day, things were still the same. The lawsuits were still in court (and mostly being lost) and most importantly; the AWB is still going to sunset on September 13th.

We didn't lose; they did because they have not made any real headway in extending the AWB. The lawsuit issue can always be taken up again, or perhaps people will just realize that it's stupid to gamble on the outcome of a weak lawsuit.

Anyway, the so-called Million Moms are in the downward spiral that started shortly after they were forced to give up their taxpayer-paid quarters in San Francisco General Hospital.

I can only hope, writing this in mid-March that by the time you read this, the Second Amendment Sisters and the S.A.F.E.R. event will have finished the job we started four years ago.