Hard political choices

The New York Times has an editorial that, not unexpectedly, decries the loss of gun control laws:

Cravenness and horse trading are too often the political reality in Washington, but a deal now in the works is particularly cruel.
Congress is poised, finally, to give the tax-paying citizens of the District of Columbia what they have been so long and so unfairly denied: a representative with the power to vote. But the gun lobby has extracted too high a price: the scuttling of vital local gun controls intended to keep the capital city’s residents safe.
The district’s nonvoting representative, Eleanor Holmes Norton, has reluctantly accepted this extortion. “The strength of gun forces in Congress has grown, not diminished,” she declared in explaining why she felt forced to abandon her long fight for a measure free of gun lobby abuses. She estimates that her cause and the Democratic majority may only be weakened in the next election. And she feels the gun lobby is powerful enough to oppress the district with a stand-alone measure.
That all may be true. But it is not inevitable and certainly not enough reason to hand the gun lobby this pernicious victory.
The legislation would intrude on home-rule prerogatives by repealing the district’s restrictions on semiautomatic weapons, rolling back requirements for registering most guns, and even dropping existing criminal penalties for owners of unregistered firearms.
House Democratic leaders previously opposed gun control attachments, but they, too, seem ready to accept the measure, inserted in the Senate’s version of the D.C. voting bill by John Ensign, a Republican of Nevada.
As usual, bipartisan majorities stand by to do the gun lobby’s bidding. It has already been endorsed by the Democratic majority l

Rico says it's much to-do about nothing, as usual with firearms issues...