The outline of Senate gun legislation put together by a bipartisan group of 10 Republicans and 10 Democrats is a sensible first step in the right direction. Congress should do its duty and be seen to do its duty in the aftermath of massacres in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, New York.
It will take much work on detail to get a bill passed on Capitol Hill and sent to President Joe Biden for signing. But it must be done. Perhaps above all, it will require rejection of nonstarter demands from the Left trashing the Second Amendment and sniping from the Right refusing even sensible and constitutionally proper measures.
Both Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Chris Murphy (D-CT) deserve praise for putting this deal together. Far too often, officeholders use catastrophic and deadly events only to score political points, not to advance solutions. Murphy did not get anywhere near everything he wanted on guns, and Cornyn took significant political risk in working with Democrats to identify common ground. Washington would be a better place with more of Murphy’s humility and Cornyn’s bravery.
The most controversial part of the bipartisan deal is a new grant program for states that create or have created red flag laws, which construct mechanisms for communities to deny firearms to dangerous people with mental illness.
They vary from state to state but usually require a law enforcement agency to file a court petition and a judge to confiscate a person’s firearms and ban him or her from buying new ones. A warrant must be obtained for confiscation if a targeted individual won’t give them up voluntarily. In some states, family members and “close contacts” such as teachers can also file petitions with the court.
It is right that deadly weapons should be taken away from people properly deemed psychotic or a genuine danger to others, but such laws must be tightly drafted and administered to avoid abuse. Some raise concerns because people can contest court orders only after they are issued, an apparent breach of due process. And while red flag orders are supposed to be sealed, most can be found in court records and commercial legal databases. This means even those that are successfully challenged can damage reputations wrongly and, for example, hinder future employment prospects.
The Senate plan of adopting no one red flag law and leaving the details to states is the right way to go, as it will provide a body of case law — poorly drafted laws can be fine-tuned or thrown out, and good ones can become a model for others.
The new proposals would also close the “boyfriend” loophole by extending the ban on gun ownership to anyone convicted of domestic abuse, not just married partners, live-in partners, or co-parents. Additionally, juvenile criminal records will be added to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.
These measures are sensible and workable and should become law. In both cases, only those who have already received due process will have their Second Amendment rights restricted — properly so, for the danger they pose has already been proved.
The legislation includes more funding for mental health programs, a long-overdue move that one hopes will mark the beginning of a more hands-on approach to mental illness. And the outline proposes more money for school security, an obvious and necessary response to recent events.
All these measures included in the outline make it worthy of support, but the same can be said in noting what has not been included. There are no vague, virtue-signaling demands for bans on “assault weapons,” a term intended to mislead, nor is there a demand for a ban on big magazines, which are just a way of harassing law-abiding gun owners. The Uvalde killer took scores of small magazines with him on his rampage and was not close to running out of ammo by the time he was shot dead.
The new Senate proposals will not end gun violence. Systems are only as good as the data put into them, so, for example, background checks will never be perfect.
And much the best way to reduce gun homicides — 90% of which are perpetrated with handguns, not rifles — is for prosecutors to do a better job of enforcing existing laws, not treating violent criminals for ideological purposes as victims and letting them stay free.
But the perfect is both unattainable and should not be allowed to be the enemy of the good. The most recent move in the Senate is a good one. It deserves to be built on in good faith by elected officials on both sides of the aisle.
