Fix NICS remains an inroad

Murphy proposes open amendment process on gun background check bill

With Senate consideration of gun measures still nowhere in sight, Sen. Chris Murphy is proposing a solution that would give both sides a chance to put forward amendments to his Fix NICS bill, which would boost the FBI’s beleaguered background-check system.

Under Murphy’s plan, the Senate would debate Fix NICS, with Republicans and Democrats afforded the opportunity to debate three amendments on each side.

The procedure theoretically would ease the objections of Democrats — Murphy included — who say beefing up the existing National Instant Criminal Background Check System is a small-potato answer to mass shootings, particularly since the one at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 that took 26 lives.

Murphy and Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, coauthored Fix NICS, a carrot-andstick series of incentives for states and government agencies to submit names of individuals unqualified under federal law to buy firearms.

Licensed gun dealers rely on NICS for required background checks before selling a gun to a customer. In some of the mass shootings in the past decade, disqualifying information had not been entered.

“I don’t think we should wait a day more, one day longer, before we have an open debate on the Senate floor (on doing) something about the epidemic of gun violence in this country,” Murphy said on the Senate floor Monday.

Cornyn has proposed the Senate consider Fix NICS as

a stand-alone bill, since it is one of the few proposals that senators of both parties can support. He has blamed Democrats — particularly Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. — for holding up Fix NICS in order to up the ante on guncontrol legislation.

“A bill to repair just one tiny little aspect of the background check system is not sufficient,” Schumer said last week.

But Democrats still insist they are not to blame for the lack of progress on new gun laws since the Feb. 14 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Fla., which resulted in 17 deaths.

A shooting on Tuesday morning at Great Mills High School in Maryland left the 17-year-old shooter dead, but it added to the sense of urgency within the halls of Congress to do something on guns.

Murphy and Connecticut’s other Democratic lawmakers in Washington want at a minimum to see action on universal background checks — closure of the “gun-show loophole.”

This same measure fell six votes short in the Senate in April 2013, four months after the Sandy Hook shooting. Opposed by the National Rifle Association, the proposal would extend background checks to private sales between individuals, including those at gun shows.

Rep. Elizabeth Esty, DConn., who is vice chairwoman of the House Democrats’ Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, said the House and Senate could wrap Fix NICS into the omnibus spending bills that must be passed by the end of the week in order to avoid another government shutdown.

“Is it enough?” Esty said of Fix NICS. “Far from it. But we have to crawl before we can walk, and we have to walk before we can run. With the dysfunction we have in the House, it’s important to take steps forward and build on it.”