A federal gun law by 4th of July? It’s possible

The Fourth of July is coming, and if all goes well — crossing many fingers — before Congress leaves town to celebrate, the House and Senate will have passed the first substantial gun safety legislation in nearly 30 years.

Yeah, the last big reform was in 1994.

Chris Murphy was in college, just turning 21. Murphy is now a member of the Senate from Connecticut and the lead Democratic negotiator on gun safety legislation.

And there’s actually a real bill! Or at least a bipartisan agreement for what ought to be in a bill.

“No bill I’ve ever been involved in has been perfect,” said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown For Gun Safety, who’s certainly been involved in his share. “But look at the big picture. You’ve got bipartisan support for a gun safety bill.”

Well, 10 Republican senators publicly signed on, which is exactly the number you need to get past the inevitable filibuster motion. That’s 20% of the party’s senators.

But once again, we need to think positive. Murphy told me that in 2012, when a young gunman with an assault rifle killed 20 small children and six staff members in his district’s Sandy Hook Elementary School, only “one single Republican was willing to sit down and talk” about possible legislation: Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania.

Ten is better than one. The plan they’ve come up with would make it easier to disarm domestic abusers, provide a lot of new money for community mental health programs and school security, and expand the background checks on gun buyers younger than 21.

“We couldn’t have gotten an agreement on any single one of those items a month ago,” Murphy said.

Even Mitch McConnell seems to be coming around. The Senate Republican leader has always been pretty proud of his record on weapons legislation, which it’s fair to summarize as anti-gun safety. But now he’s given his blessing to some sort of reform. Perhaps he’s seen the public polls.

If something’s going to get done before the Senate goes off on its holiday recess, things have to happen pretty fast in a chamber not known for its speediness.

But about the gun bill. The first — and let’s face it, easiest — priority is to complain that Washington isn’t rising to the occasion. “It’s not enough,” said Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, after he rather grudgingly acknowledged the new Senate agreement represented some success.

You can understand why Illinois is particularly touchy on this issue. At the NRA convention in Houston last month, speakers tried to skip over the mass shooting of Texas schoolchildren days earlier by talking about how many people get gunned down every year in Chicago. Mainly with weapons imported from other states, of course, although that part didn’t really come up.

Right now our priority has to be rooting for the gun bill negotiators in Congress to get the job done before everybody goes home. “We’ve got to work through some pretty sticky wickets,” said Murphy.

The wickets are, in fact, multitudinous, but at least things are moving along. “Victories beget victories,” insisted Murphy.

There’s a lot of territory to cover before we get to anyplace sane on the gun front. To anyplace near where surveys tell us the American people would like to go. But it’d be nice if, on July 4, we could celebrate with more fireworks and less gunfire.