Lawmakers use displacement and flawed reasoning to reject gun controls.

Evidence

Appeals to conscience and concern over public safety fell largely on deaf ears. When the gun-regulation proposals were presented for a vote on the floor of the Senate, the Republicans adamantly opposed them. … In an odd line of reasoning, Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa opposed universal background checks because such a law would lead criminals to steal guns or get them by straw purchases. Senator Charles Schumer of New York acknowledged that this might still be possible, but noted that such a line of reasoning has never been applied to any other law: “We shouldn’t have laws because the bad people will get around them anyway” (Steinhauer, 2013b). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1318

Categorization

• XREF: Grassley’s argument that background checks would merely push criminals to straw purchases is a textbook moral-disengagement move (the inevitability-of-bad-outcomes justification) that Bandura is presumably about to dissect; connects to the vault’s interest in how policy opponents rationalize.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1318