Tepid response to gun control bill
Measure would keep firearms out of hands of those on watch lists
WASHINGTON — Sen. Susan Collins’s gun control compromise will get a vote in the Senate this month — the only question is whether enough senators will support it.
Collins, R-Maine, and her supporters are selling their measure, which would bar roughly 2,700 Americans suspected of being terrorists from buying a gun, as the only way to break the political logjam surrounding the emotionally charged issue of gun control in the wake of violent shootings, such as the one in Orlando over a week ago.
“What you see here is an effort not to have a vote that will simply allow each party to use a cudgel to beat the other party with, but rather to have something that would actually pass,” said Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., a member of the eight-person group that met with Collins over the last week to hash out the proposal.
“It’s very comfortable for us to sit in our respective corners and vote for something that we know isn’t going to change things,” said Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., another member of Collins’s group. “It’s time to start putting progress in front of politics.”
Collins’s proposal denies the right to purchase guns to anyone on two subsets of the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database: The “No Fly List,” which prohibits suspected terrorists from boarding planes heading to or from the United States or crossing U.S. airspace; and the “Selectee List,” which requires extra screening procedures. There are approximately 109,000 people on those lists, including about 2,700 Americans, by the senators’ count.
“Essentially we believe that if you are too dangerous to fly on an airplane, you’re too dangerous to buy a gun,” Collins said Tuesday.
But Democrats have said Republicans need to lure about 20 votes in order to make passing Collins’s proposal “doable” — and that is a bar that no one is yet sure they can clear. “I think we’re getting there, I do,” Flake said.
Senate Democratic Conference Vice Chair Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said Tuesday that Collins’s proposal is “a step in the right direction” but that it also has “some serious problems.”
He argued that by focusing on the two smaller lists, hundreds of thousands of other suspected terrorists could slip through the cracks. He also said that the expedited appeals process for anyone believing they were mistakenly denied a gun is too fast.
On Monday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who authored one of four bills that failed in the Senate this week, said that Collins’s proposal is “not enough to close the loophole that creates this terror gap.”