Senator Angus King of Maine looks for middle ground on gun safety

He’s trying to square one of our country’s most polarized circles by fashioning a workable, carnage-reducing compromise on assault-style weapons.

Angus King, Independent senator from Maine, is a center-left politician adept at working in the middle, one who, though he caucuses with the Democrats, generally enjoys good relations with center-right Republicans.

Now, after a horrific mass shooting in October in Lewiston, the secondlargest city in Maine, he’s trying to square one of our country’s most polarized circles by fashioning a workable, carnage-reducing compromise on assault-style weapons.

Here, think AR-15s, the favorite rifle of the baleful public shooters who regularly wreak lethal havoc on innocent bystanders and the American psyche. Or the similar AR-10s.

Those are lightweight but durable rifles with detachable or collapsible stocks, a pistol grip that renders them easier to use in a bullet-spraying way, and often a heat shield or shroud that lets the shooter grip the rifle closer to the muzzle without burning their support hand on the hot barrel.

Limiting their lethality is the task King and Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat of New Mexico, set for themselves several years ago and formally announced in the aftermath of the mass shooting that claimed 18 lives in Lewiston.

They are not backing a ban on assault-style weapons, but the Senate duo is proposing a marked change.

“The heart of it is a fixed, internal magazine of 10 bullets that is permanent,” King said in an interview. “You can’t have a detachable magazine.”

That would mean public shooters could fire only 11 shots — the cartridge in the chamber and the 10 in the magazine — before being forced to reload. That matters because, as Mark Collins, director of federal policy at Brady, the national anti-gun-violence group, explains, in many mass shootings the carnage has been worse because the shooter had a high-capacity magazine or could reload in an instant by inserting a new one. King said that the Lewiston shooter had a second, detachable highcapacity magazine taped to the first, and when the first was empty, simply flipped the magazines over to reload.

“Our bill would make that impossible,” he said.

Certain classes of handguns would have the same fixed-magazine requirement, but the capacity would be 15 cartridges rather than 10. That restriction would apply to pistols that use the exhaust gas created by firing to operate the gun’s reloading mechanism. That is, to eject the cartridge case, chamber a new cartridge, and cock the firing mechanism.

The effort, King said, is to find a constitutionally comfortable place where reasonable lawmakers hoping to curb the scourge of gun violence can come together.

“We really have worked hard to make it something that has a shot at getting passed but also will pass constitutional muster,” he said, noting that former Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, author of the Heller decision declaring that the Second Amendment imparted a right to firearms ownership, also expressly stated that the Second Amendment right “is not unlimited.” Scalia, a philosophical originalist who long anchored the court’s conservative wing, further noted that legal scholars, commentators, and courts had long “explained that the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.” He also wrote approving of “the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of ‘dangerous and unusual weapons.’ ”

But what of the estimated 20 million to 25 million assault-style rifles with detachable magazines and/or high-capacity magazines that are already out there? Their bill would establish a voluntary buy-back program.

“Our bill says that you can keep it or pass it on to a family member, but if you sell it, you are selling it to the government, and you will be paid fair value,” King said.

So this legislation is not, in the favorite fright-mongering phrase of the gun zealots, tantamount to “gun-grabbing.”

King hopes to make this a bipartisan effort, though he acknowledges that he and Heinrich have yet to bring on board a Republican senator.

Hmm. What about Senator Susan Collins, who as Maine’s other senator also represents a state that has just undergone a harrowing tragedy? After several queries, Collins’s office issued a noncommittal statement saying she “will carefully consider” the legislation.

That, frankly, sounds like nothing more than lip service. Close observers are dubious that Collins will back the King-Heinrich approach anytime soon.

But perhaps if King wins reelection next year, timid lawmakers will come around. I asked King if he had polled on his legislation to see how it plays in Maine, a state with a strong gun and hunting culture. He hasn’t.

“I’m assuming it will cost me votes, but I’ve always tried to do what I think is right,” he said.

If only we had more of that in Congress.