The Washington Times reports:
If there’s one thing that Eric Holder regrets during his time as attorney general for the United States, it’s his failure to press through a Second Amendment crackdown on the heels of Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that left 20 children and six adults dead, he said.
“I think the inability to pass reasonable gun safety laws after the Newtown massacre is something that weighs heavily on my mind,” Mr. Holder said during an interview with CNN.
He was speaking of the White House push to pass a federal background check mandate for all commercial gun sales, as well as an outright ban on so-called assault weapons and large-capacity ammunition magazines, in the wake of the December 2012 school tragedy.
. . .
“And the thought that we could not translate that horror into reasonable — I mean, really reasonable gun safety measures that were supported by the vast majority of the American people is for me something that I take personally as a failure,” he said, The Hill reported.
For those of us who consider Eric Holder to have been a terrible attorney general, I imagine that the first instinct here will be, “really, of all your shortcomings, that’s the one you focus on?” Nevertheless, for the sake of brevity let’s put that to one side for a moment and consider instead just how perverse this suggestion is. An attorney general of the United States just lamented in public that he was unable to secure further limitations on the rights of the citizens who employed him, and that this failure “weighs heavily” on his mind. One might expect an AG to regret that he was unable to prosecute a certain class of criminals more forcefully or that he did not have enough time to more effectively alter problems within the law or to clear up ambiguities that made people’s lives difficult. One should not expect him to be vexed that the national government was unable to prohibit certain types of firearms or to restrict the means by which a free people may choose to defend themselves — and, if he is so vexed, we might hope there are more pressing issues on his mind. Who do these people think they are?