Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) is begging Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) to allow a hearing on the criminalization of private gun sales.

Murphy’s pleading comes a week after House Democrats passed legislation to criminalize private gun sales. The House bill, H.R. 8, would not have stopped a single mass shooting during the past ten years, but it would make it a criminal act for a neighbor to sell a gun to a lifelong neighbor without first getting government permission.

To put it into perspective, H.R. 8 would make it a crime for a friend to sell a gun to a lifelong friend without creating a paper trail via government involvement, but it would have done nothing to prevent the October 1, 2017, Las Vegas shooting that killed 58.

Yet Murphy is begging Graham to allow hearings on the gun control:

Last week the House passed universal background checks. Today, I led 38 of my colleagues to call on @LindseyGrahamSC to hold a hearing on our background check bill. 97% of Americans support this. It deserves a hearing in the Senate. — Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) March 6, 2019

Notice Murphy’s claim that “97 percent of Americans support” criminalizing private gun sales. Notice also that he provides no substantiation of this claim.

The left has been claiming that America’s support for criminalizing private gun sales is in the 90 percentile range ever since the December 14, 2012, attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School. What they fail to note is that a bill criminalizing private gun sales would have done nothing to prevent the Sandy Hook attack because the gunman stole his firearms. In so doing, he bypassed any and every gun control that would have been in place.

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.