Gun-control bill advances

Prospects for the passage of a gun-control bill in the Senate were boosted this week when Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) brokered a bipartisan deal on background checks for gun buyers. The legislation, which expands checks to include online and gun-show sales, is President Obama’s only remaining hope for gun-control legislation to emerge from the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. Other proposals—including bans on assault weapons and large-capacity magazines—appear doomed, despite concerted campaigning by the president. This week, Obama kept up the pressure by bringing family members of Newtown victims to Washington to personally meet key members of Congress.

The background-check bill was expected to reach the Senate floor for a vote after 12 Republicans said they wouldn’t support a conservative faction’s plan to filibuster it. If the legislative package—which also includes tougher penalties for gun-trafficking—winds up being passed by the Democratic-controlled Senate, it will face a much tougher path in the Republican-controlled House.

In the three months since Newtown, said The New York Times in an editorial, “the urgency has seeped out of the search for solutions to gun violence.” Even background checks—which the NRA once supported—now face a steep climb. About 90 percent of Americans and 85 percent of gun owners support this commonsense legislation, and voting against it would be an act of “political cowardice.”

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Gun-control laws have only one real purpose—to “make us feel better,” said Kathleen Parker in The Washington Post. Background checks wouldn’t have stopped Adam Lanza from killing 20 first-graders at Newtown, since he had no criminal record and used his mother’s arsenal. Criminals ignore gun laws, and psychopaths always find a way to kill.

“It’s true,” said Margaret Talbot in The New Yorker, “a background check would not have stopped Adam Lanza.” But any serious piece of gun-control legislation could start the process of beginning a shift in America’s attitude toward guns. Passage of a bill would challenge the NRA’s “corrosive view that the only answer to gun violence is more guns.”