Last Updated on November 29, 2022
GOP establishment leader Kevin McCarthy supported Democrat plans to limit the 2nd Amendment rights of American citizens amidst the left’s nationwide push to ban guns in 2017. McCarthy publicly supported a ban on “bump stocks,” a seldom-used rifle attachment with questionable efficacy.
Representative Kevin McCarthy was among the GOP members who collaborated with Democrats in 2017 to take a bite out of Americans’ 2nd Amendment rights, championing a ban on so-called “bump stocks” after the Las Vegas shooting. Right by his side was Paul Ryan, the notoriously anti-Trump establishment figure who left Washington after the 2018 midterms, only to re-appear as the backer of several anti-MAGA GOP candidates.
Much like the Democrats, McCarthy was calling for limits on the 2nd Amendment before the investigation into the shooting had even been completed.
Speaking at the time to Reuters, McCarthy said that banning bump stocks is “definitely an area we should look at,” before acknowledging that the investigation had yet to be completed.
“But I think this is definitely an area we’re going to look [at] and be able to act on,” McCarthy said of banning bump stocks.
Despite the protests of the American People, McCarthy, the GOP establishment, and their Democrat allies got their wish, and bump stocks were indeed banned by an executive order, signed by President Trump.
The signing of the order is among a small number of incidents frequently cited by America First conservatives when speaking as to “what went wrong” during the Trump Administration.
In the case of the bump stock ban, establishment politicians like Kevin McCarthy and Paul Ryan, led a public campaign to force the President’s hand. At the time, Republicans were in control of Congress, meaning that the GOP had to take up the issue themselves, and weren’t dragged to the table by Democrats, as is so often characterized.
Amazingly, McCarthy, Ryan, and others managed to force gun control on the American People without attaching their names to a congressional vote.
Only now, McCarthy’s support for the bump stock ban has resurfaced, as he once again pursues the Speaker’s gavel in Congress.
With more than a dozen GOP legislators openly calling for a new Speaker candidate, and others appearing to lack confidence in their potential vote for McCarthy, the establishment leader doesn’t have the support he needs, and has dubbed himself “Speaker-elect” in an apparent effort to fake it until he makes it.
Related: Betrayal: Marjorie Taylor Greene Endorses Kevin McCarthy, Who Says He Won’t Impeach Biden, for Speaker
5 years after the Las Vegas shooting, many Americans still have questions about what actually happened.
61 people, including the shooter, died, and hundreds more were injured by shrapnel and trampling crowds, in what appeared to an orchestrated terror attack.
While online sleuths and guerilla investigators have purportedly drawn links between the shooting and the Saudi regime, members of which were present in Las Vegas during the attack, few official details have been revealed to the public.
The shooter, Stephen Paddock, had hundreds of weapons in the hotel room he used as a sniper’s nest for the mass shooting attack, and it remains unclear whether or not he actually used a bump stock on any of them during the shooting.
A rarely used rifle attachment before the ban, a bump stock, when used on a semi-automatic rifle, may increase the rate at which the weapon fires, but doesn’t transform it into the “rapid fire” killing machine that corporate media and establishment politicians, like Kevin McCarthy, claimed they do.