In poll after poll, for more than a decade, Americans have overwhelmingly supported requiring universal background checks on all purchases of firearms. At the beginning of this month, the House of Representatives passed a bill to require background checks of all would-be gun buyers. Eleven states already require a background check for virtually all sales, gifts, or other transfers of guns. But U.S. law only requires a background check when someone seeks to buy a firearm from a federally licensed gun dealer. No background checks are required for private sales. Enacted into law, the House bill—H.R. 8—would change that.
The trouble is, while the bill passed the House 240-190, with eight Republicans joining the all but two Democrats who voted for it, the Senate is a different story. If all 45 Democrats and the two Democrat-caucusing independents were to stand firm, they would still need 13 Republicans to join them for the bill to pass there, since it needs 60 votes to avoid a filibuster.
In 2013, the last time a universal background check law came up in the Senate—in the wake of the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre—it garnered only 54 of the needed votes, with four Republicans joining 50 Democrats in support. Four Democrats joined the opposition, but they’ve all been replaced by more conservative Republicans. Only two of the dissenting Republicans—Patrick Toomey of Pennysylvania and Susan Collins of Maine—are still in the Senate.
The math clearly doesn’t look very good.
Too few Senate Democrats have displayed any enthusiasm for getting a vote on the background checks bill. Moreover, there is that roadblock whose initials are Mitch McConnell. And, of course, there is always the possibility, the likelihood, that Donald Trump would veto the bill if it somehow did clear the Senate, although he has sporadically and unpredictably wavered hot and cold on some gun-related reforms.
Whatever the hurdles to legislation, the youthful grassroots activism that has arisen in the wake of the Parkland, Florida, massacre of high schoolers and staff has brought gun reform back into discussion. Young people aren’t the only activists at work on senators. Some 200 survivors of shooting victims, informally led by Frank Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter Jaime was murdered in the Parkland shooting, have written a letter to Democratic senators calling them out for not championing universal background checks and urging them to “fight for us” on gun-law reform.
Heidi Przybyla at NBC News reported about the letter Thursday, noting that Democrats being especially singled out are senators running for president, including Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey, who serve on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over gun-related legislation:
We are calling on every single senator who supports background checks to go to the body of the Senate and begin discussing the bold policies we need to build a future with fewer guns — and not stop until there is a vote," says the letter. "This is doubly true for the senators who are running for president. They must prove to us that they can lead by doing everything in their power to get this through the Senate." [...]
"This letter is the very first step in a monthslong effort to make progress in the Senate," said Igor Volsky, director of Guns Down America, the group that helped organize the letter. It "is addressed to the self-proclaimed champions of background checks. If you're going to call yourself a champion on this issue, you better act like it," he said.
Numerous critics argue that it’s pointless to try to pass legislation now, with the Senate and White House under Republican control. But this misses the value in showing voters what Democrats would do if they didn’t have those GOP obstacles in the way, and in getting Republicans on the record as standing against things many or most Americans support. Showing voters what you’ll do if they put you into a position to do it is more likely to encourage them to actually put you there than is hemming and hawing, or staying silent. Many Democrats have shied away from advocating gun-law reform, seeing it as politically toxic. They need to turn the tables and make it toxic for Republicans to oppose changes in the law that nearly every American thinks are long overdue.