Assuming They Can Read At All

“This is what happens when bills are passed and signed prior to reading,” says MacDuff:

FOX News — It may sound absurd. But President Obama signed a bill into law Wednesday that requires passengers who carry firearms aboard Amtrak be locked in boxes for their journey. It’s a mistake in the law’s wording. But for now, the clerical error is the law of the land. Earlier this week, Congress sent the president a massive spending bill that funded dozens of federal departments. Tucked into the transportation section of the legislation are safety requirements for Amtrak customers who carry firearms on board the government-backed train system. The bill Congress passed mandates that passengers with firearms declare they have weapons with them in advance and stow them in locked boxes while on the train. The bill text was correct when the House approved the legislation last week. The Senate followed suit Sunday, but somewhere along the line, the language that referred to putting the guns in locked boxes morphed into stuffing “passengers” into locked boxes. … Pelosi’s staff tried to negotiate with Republican aides to see if they would agree to change the text of the bill without revoting the entire piece of legislation. But it was all for naught as Obama had already signed the measure into law…

I want to see someone take a gun on the train and see if they have a lockbox big enough to put him in. They might have to borrow one of Al Gore’s famous lockboxes.

It’s clear the typo alters the legislation’s mandate. But no one quite knows the origin of the mistake.

Well, unless the wording gets corrected before June (according to the law, Amtrak has six months to implement it), the Congress has effectively passed what amounts to a complete ban on guns on Amtrak. I’m not entirely convinced that this was an accident. Simply copying and pasting wouldn’t have changed the wording, someone had to do that manually.