Shooting blanks

Monday, as Gov. Hochul signed into law measures making New York State’s tough gun safety laws tougher still — barring anyone under 21 from buying a semiautomatic rifle like the one a teen used to slaughter 10 people in Buffalo, restricting body armor sales, making it easier to seize the guns of people known to present a danger to themselves or others, and more — a bipartisan group of negotiating U.S. senators held hands and tiptoed toward nothing in particular.

We here would never want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, particularly when there are lives on the line, but the operative question in Washington is whether the almost meaningless is the enemy of the merely inadequate.

In 2013, 54 senators, including four Republicans, voted for a Joe Manchin-Pat Toomey bill to require background checks on every firearm purchase. Today, about 400,000 gun deaths and hundreds of mass shootings later, including 10 just this weekend, nothing nearly that impactful is on the table.

Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, one of the

Democrats working to broker a deal, says “I’ve never been part of conversations that are this serious and this thoughtful before.” Yet according to the Washington Post, the biggest idea being discussed is dangling federal cash and standards to encourage states to set up redflag laws. On background checks, the Post reports that “any deal would be much more limited than previous expansion proposals.” No assault weapons ban, much less raising the age for buying those killing machines to 21.

Who do they answer to? Sixty-two percent of Americans polled by CBS News and YouGov said they back a nationwide ban on semi-automatic rifles; 81% want background checks on all gun buyers; 72% favor a federal “red flag” law, and 77% say the minimum legal age for buying an AR-15-style weapon should be 21 or even higher. In a new ABC-News Ipsos poll, 70% of Americans say enacting new gun-safety laws should be a higher priority than protecting the right to own weapons.

Maybe the next time we bury a classroom full of children, the politicians will start catching up to the people.