Congress has an opportunity to regain a little of America’s respect.
This opportunity began early Thursday morning when Republican Party leaders reportedly agreed to allow votes on two proposed gun control measures after Senate Democrats filibustered for nearly 15 hours.
The leader of that filibuster was Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut – the state where 20 elementary school students and six teachers were killed with an assault rifle by an unbalanced 20-year-old in 2012. Murphy’s filibuster followed a shooting massacre last weekend at a gay nightclub in Orlando that claimed 49 lives before police killed the shooter – a shooter who had expressed hate for gays and claimed allegiance to ISIS. Investigators have called the Orlando shooter a home-grown extremist who self-radicalized to become a lone wolf attacker.
The Orlando shooting marked the 47th mass shooting with assault weapons in the U.S. since an assault weapons sales ban expired in 2004, according to research by The Boston Globe. In those shootings – with guns that fire up to 45 rounds per minute – 411 people died, according to the Globe.
Murphy said the compromise reached during his filibuster means votes will be held on whether to expand background checks to gun shows and internet sales, as well as whether to ban people from buying guns if they are on the government’s terrorist watch list. Not mentioned – yet – is a reinstatement of the assault weapons ban.
“We did not have that commitment (for any consideration of any gun vote) when we started today,” Murphy said.
That’s an understatement. In December – even in the wake of a mass shooting by another self-radicalized, American-born “extremist” in San Bernardino, and just six months after a Chattanooga-grown “extremist” killed five servicemen here – our spineless Senate voted down what should have been a slam-dunk measure to put possible terror suspects who are listed on U.S. “no-fly” lists also on a no-buy gun list.
It can be argued that these shooters were not on active FBI radar and weren’t on the no-fly lists, but more than 2,043 suspected terrorists who were on the list successfully passed tests to buy guns between 2004 and 2014, according to the Government Accountability Office. Given that, only the most cynical of us would have expected that only one Republican senator in the entire Republican Senate majority would think we – American citizens – might be more important than the Second Amendment rights of suspected terrorists. Yet only one Republican, Mark Kirk of Illinois, supported the terrorist ban.
Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker voted no. So did Georgia Republicans Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson. Ditto Alabama GOP members Jeff Sessions and Richard Shelby. So the measure failed, as did another that would have expanded background checks to gun shows and internet sales.
Sure there are people who are mistakenly on the terrorist watch list. It’s been argued that Sen. Ted Kennedy was once incorrectly listed there. But that’s what appeals are for. In the meantime, couldn’t we at least slightly inconvenience terror suspects?
More importantly, can’t we pass some kind – any kind – of additional common-sense gun safety laws?
There are 12,000 gun murders every year in the United States and about 91 Americans are killed with guns every day. Our gun murder rate is 25 times the average of other developed countries. Any common-sense gun background checks and warfare gun bans we can enact – and especially a combination of these things – can save lives.
Criminal background checks are not gun control. If you pass the background check, you get to buy a gun. It’s the people who fail that we don’t want having guns. This is common sense.
We make cars safer not by banning them but with a myriad of little regulations like licensing and driving tests and seat belts – so, yes, we can do something about gun violence through common-sense regulation.
Poll after poll shows Americans heartily support expanding background checks. Even gun owners support it. Even real-people members of the National Rifle Association support it. But the money arm of the NRA organization does not support it. That’s because the NRA also serves as the de facto trade group of gunmakers like Barrett and Remington, and those gunmakers want to sell more guns, not fewer. So the NRA gave $30.6 million in campaign donations to our Congress members in 2014 alone.
In the Orlando shooting aftermath, American outrage rose once again over the fact that Congress last year refused to tighten gun controls even on those listed on the FBI’s terrorist watchlist. But with each mass shooting, Americans look again at Congress. Our citizens may flock to buy their own gun, but they also look at the dysfunction of a Congress that refuses to protect them so they must do it themselves.
They, and we, will be watching again to see if our senators – Tennessee’s Alexander and Corker, Georgia’s Chambliss and Isakson, Alabama’s Sessions and Shelby – will this time vote for lives, not the NRA.