The Post spoke to seven former and current senators who said they regret their positions against gun-control proposals after the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, in which an assault-weapon-wielding gunman mowed down 20 children who were 6 and 7 years old: Sens. Michael F. Bennet (D-Colo.), Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), Angus King (I-Maine) and Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) and former senators Mark Begich (D-Alaska), Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), and Mark Udall (D-Colo.). The defeated bills included not only a ban on semiautomatic weapons such as the AR-style rifles and a ban on the high-capacity magazines, which can render mass shootings deadlier, but also a modest measure introduced by Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.) focused on expanding background checks during commercial gun purchases, including at shows and on the internet.
Mr. Udall, who voted against the assault weapons ban, said if he could go back in time he would advise his younger self: “This is going to get worse and worse.” And it did: Charleston, Orlando, Las Vegas, Parkland, Pittsburgh, Uvalde, Highland Park, Half Moon Bay — to cite a partial list of massacres. Meanwhile, The Post’s reporting has shown in agonizing detail the devastation a bullet from the AR-15 wreaks on the human body: tearing through tissue and exploding into tiny and lethal bits of shrapnel. The photographs the paper assembled of body bags laid out in a school hallway and of blood spattered underneath a “Love Yourself” backpack were an especially difficult part of the story — but especially necessary, too.
Humility from the Senate is always welcome — and the legislators deserve credit for admitting their years-old mistakes. To be sure Congress passed, and President Biden signed, a bipartisan compromise in 2022. It limited high-risk individuals’ ability to access firearms in several ways: expanding the definition of federally regulated licensed dealers; enhancing background checks for young buyers; closing the so-called boyfriend loophole, which allowed some domestic abusers to buy guns; and funding states’ implementation of red-flag laws. But the measures Congress considered and rejected after Sandy Hook still define its urgent unfinished business.
Roughly 16 million people in the United States — 1 in 20 adults — own at least one AR-style rifle. When equipped with high-capacity magazines that have allowed shooters to fire as many as 100 bullets without reloading, or bump stocks that accelerate the rate of firing to near-automatic, these semiautomatic versions of machine guns U.S. troops use in battle too closely resemble the military models. Bump stock availability was so patently unjustified that, as president, even Donald Trump, a self-styled champion of the Second Amendment, signed an executive order prohibiting them. That regulation is now tied up in court; Congress has yet to legislate to the same end.
Mr. Heinrich told The Post that the 2013 assault weapons ban proposal wasn’t perfect, but “when you weigh that against what we’ve experienced in the intervening years, if that were on the floor would I vote for it? Yeah.” It is true that the circumstances, to some extent, have changed. We know more about the damage these weapons can do. Gun-control advocacy has grown at last into a formidable rival to the savvy and well-heeled gun lobby; support for it is at least somewhat less politically risky. No doubt these political shifts created a permission structure of sorts for the senators to go public with their second thoughts. Good.
In truth, the danger and, indeed, the absurdity of permitting people to buy the kind of firepower that the Sandy Hook shooter unleashed on an elementary school — 154 rounds in less than four minutes — has been apparent for some time. A Sandy Hook mother told The Post that after the Manchin-Toomey bill failed more than a decade ago, she felt like she had “failed to protect [her son] from getting killed and then … failed to do something for his legacy or protect [her] surviving son’s future.” The failure was not hers but Congress’s. Some of that failure’s authors have expressed regrets, raising the question: What will today’s lawmakers have to say for themselves a decade from now?
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