The Fourth of July is coming, and if all goes well – crossing many fingers – before Congress leaves town to celebrate, the House and Senate will have passed the first substantial gun safety legislation in nearly 30 years.
Yeah, the last big reform was in 1994. People were watching the pilot episode of “Friends” on TV, Jeff Bezos was founding Amazon and American kids were hearing about a great new invention called PlayStation.
Chris Murphy was in college, just turning 21. “I bought my first beer legally,” he said in a phone interview Wednesday. Moving onward and upward, Murphy is now a member of the Senate from Connecticut and the lead Democratic negotiator on gun safety legislation.
And there’s actually a real bill! Or at least a bipartisan agreement for what ought to be in a bill. Our job for today is to decide how we feel about it. Three choices:
A. Awful! They don’t even have a ban on the sale of assault weapons to 18-year-olds.
B. Not great! They keep putting all this power in the hands of the states when we all know how crazy some of the states are.
C. Hey, they’re actually doing something – stop the negativity! Otherwise, you’ll be the kind of perfectionist nobody wants to be standing next to while grilling holiday hamburgers.
Yeah, I think we ought to go with C.
“No bill I’ve ever been involved in has been perfect,” said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown For Gun Safety, who’s certainly been involved in his share. “But look at the big picture. You’ve got bipartisan support for a gun safety bill.”
Well, 10 Republican senators publicly signed on, which is exactly the number you need to get past the inevitable filibuster motion. That’s 20% of the party’s senators.
The plan they’ve come up with would make it easier to disarm domestic abusers, provide a lot of new money for community mental health programs and school security, and expand the background checks on gun buyers younger than 21.
Even Mitch McConnell seems to be coming around. The Senate Republican leader has always been pretty proud of his record on weapons legislation, which it’s fair to summarize as anti-gun safety. But now he’s given his blessing to some sort of reform. Perhaps he’s seen the error of his ways. Perhaps he’s seen the public polls.
If something’s going to get done before the Senate goes off on its holiday recess, things have to happen pretty fast in a chamber not known for its speediness. “It took them five weeks to write an infrastructure bill. We have four days,” said Murphy.
About the gun bill. The first – and let’s face it, easiest – priority is to complain that Washington isn’t rising to the occasion. “It’s not enough,” said Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, after he rather grudgingly acknowledged the new Senate agreement represented some success.
The horror of those murdered children persuaded a lot of politicians to dodge a NRA gathering in Texas recently. Not Donald Trump, a politician who actually had no idea he had any strong feelings about guns until he noticed how much cheering they got at Republican gatherings. In Houston, Trump helpfully suggested responding to the Uvalde school shooting tragedy by arming teachers.
Right now our priority has to be rooting for the gun bill negotiators in Congress to get the job done before everybody goes home. “We’ve got to work through some pretty sticky wickets,” said Murphy.
There’s a lot of territory to cover before we get to anyplace sane on the gun front. To anyplace near where surveys tell us the American people would like to go. But it’d be nice if, on July 4, we could celebrate with more fireworks and less gunfire.
The New York Times