The first step in understanding the new legislative framework on gun violence that a bipartisan group of senators agreed to on Sunday is grasping how its Republican participants see it. “This is not about creating new restrictions on law-abiding citizens,” Senator John Cornyn, who led the Republican side, said last week. “It’s about insuring that the system we already have in place works as intended.”
In other words, the Republicans insisted that the current free-for-all essentially be left in place, while accepting some secondary reforms that will not enrage the gun lobby sufficiently to spell doom for their future in the G.O.P. That limited framework means no ban on assault weapons or high-capacity cartridges, which President Biden has repeatedly called for. No direct expansion of background checks to online sales and gun shows, which the senators Joe Manchin and Pat Toomey proposed in 2013. And no equalizing of the age at which young people can buy handguns and semi-automatic rifles. (The age requirement for purchasing handguns from licensed dealers is twenty-one; for rifles, it’s eighteen.)
After the loss of thirty-one more American lives to two separate shooters armed with AR-15-style rifles, both of whom had just turned eighteen, the refusal to raise the age requirement for semi-automatic rifles seems particularly absurd. But it’s a direct result of Cornyn’s twisted logic. Until they went on their rampages, the alleged shooters in Buffalo and Uvalde were law-abiding Americans, and they were legally entitled to purchase the Bushmaster XM-15 and Daniel Defense AR-15 rifles that were used to commit mass murder. If the Senate raised the age requirement for buying these types of weapons, this would amount to a new restriction on other law-abiding eighteen-year-olds. Keeping the asymmetry satisfies Cornyn’s guidelines and preserves the G.O.P. logic—the logic of a madhouse.
The new agreement increases funding for mental health and school safety, but its centerpiece is a new federal grant program designed to encourage states to introduce “red-flag laws,” which empower judges, usually at the request of local law-enforcement authorities, to issue orders that keep guns away from people they deem a threat to themselves or others. As I noted back in 2018, the spread of state red-flag laws has been one of the few glimmers of hope in the gun-control impasse. In the wake of the massacre at Parkland High School, the G.O.P.-controlled Florida legislature passed one. Today, somewhat different versions of them are on the books in nineteen states and Washington, D.C.
They seem to work reasonably well. Since the passage of the measure in Florida, “judges have acted more than 8,000 times to keep guns out of the hands of people authorities deemed a risk to themselves or others,” CNN reports. Researchers at U.C. Davis looked at hundreds of restraining orders issued under California’s red-flag law, which went into effect in 2016. They found that more than three-quarters of the orders involved cases of potential harm to others, and nearly thirty per cent of them involved mass-shooting threats. “The findings suggest [red-flag orders] are being used as intended—to remove firearms from individuals threatening to harm themselves, their intimate partners, co-workers, classmates or the general public,” Veronica Pear, one of the authors of the study, said.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that the new grant system, which would provide states with federal funding for introducing red-flag laws, would be a voluntary one, so there’s no guarantee that Republican-run states, such as Texas and Georgia, would follow the example of Florida. In many red states, there is still a good deal of resistance to these laws, and some local Republican politicians who have proposed them have run into significant pushback. So it’s not clear what impact the new funding will have.
Also, though red-flag laws certainly do some good, they are far from sufficient to prevent gun massacres. Most mass shooters don’t get reported to the authorities before they go on their killing sprees. Even when an alarm is raised, the authorities don’t necessarily act in time. New York State introduced a red-flag law in 2019. Two years later, police in the Buffalo shooter’s home town, near Binghamton, visited him after he made a comment about murder-suicide in a high-school class. The officers took him to a hospital for a mental-health evaluation but didn’t seek a red-flag order to prevent him from acquiring guns.
Given the glaring inadequacies of the new framework, the strongest argument in its favor is that it’s better than nothing. “Obviously, it does not do everything that I think is needed, but it reflects important steps in the right direction, and would be the most significant gun safety legislation to pass Congress in decades,” President Biden said, in a statement released by the White House. With the implacable refusal of the G.O.P. on Capitol Hill to approve meaningful gun-control measures, the President is setting a very low bar. A much better outcome would be for his party to unite in declaring the gun crisis a national emergency that justifies amending the filibuster and passing a Senate version of the Protecting Our Kids Act, which the House passed last week. That isn’t going to happen.
Still, on Sunday, some gun-control advocates defended the new agreement. According to Senator Chris Murphy, who led the negotiations on the Democratic side, it also includes restrictions on straw purchases, enhanced background checks for buyers under the age of twenty-one, and a closure of the “boyfriend loophole,” which allowed some people convicted of domestic abuse to pass background checks and keep their guns. “If even one life is saved or one attempted mass shooting is prevented because of these regulations, we believe that it is worth fighting for,” David Hogg, a founder and board member of March for Our Lives, the student-led movement that emerged from the Parkland massacre, said, in a statement.
After a generation of carnage and legislative inaction, the larger hope among gun-control advocates is that this agreement will break years of partisan deadlock and open the way for future measures. “Once you get politicians supporting something like this and getting reëlected, I think that gives them the latitude to look at some other things,” Josh Horwitz, the executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, told me in 2018, when I wrote about the growing popularity of red-flag laws at the state level. Assuming the new framework is passed into law, which is by no means certain, it will have taken four years, and many more mass shootings, for Congress to catch up with the states. In our broken political system, the fact that any deal was reached can be classified as progress. But progress has never seemed so slow, painful, and inadequate.
