Centrist Senators Blew an Easy Opportunity to Pass a Simple Gun Safety Measure

Just hours before an Army reservist shot up a bowling alley and then a bar in rural Maine, the U.S. Senate voted to prohibit the Veterans Administration from automatically reporting to the FBI background checks system the names of veterans deemed mentally incompetent who had relinquished the management of their finances to others.

Three Democrats and two independents joined all Republicans in the vote to shield these veterans and protect their easy access to guns—a vote which some may wish to reconsider in the aftermath of the mass shooting in Maine carried out by a veteran recently hospitalized for mental health reasons.

“You can’t make this stuff up,” Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) said the morning after the shooting, pointing to the ill-timed vote that would expand gun rights for people whose access to guns should be restricted.

Are Mass Shootings Just the Cost of Living in America?

Newsom didn’t call out the Democrats and the independents who teamed up with the GOP, but I will. They are Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV), Jon Tester (D-MT), Jackie Rosen (D-NV), Angus King (I-ME), and Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ)—all hailing from strong pro-gun states. (With the exception of Manchin and Sinema, who have not yet revealed their future plans, the senators are running for re-election.)

Newsom didn’t mention party affiliation in his missive. He didn’t have to. Congress’s inability to act on gun control (among other defining issues) is well-known. Besides, Newsom is raising money for Sen. Tester’s re-election. Supporting gun rights is a given in Montana, and so is keeping the Senate in Democratic hands. You can’t have one without the other.

Newsom is the only Democrat with name recognition and presidential ambition to be totally unequivocal about gun safety. He is calling for a constitutional amendment that would enshrine the basic principles of gun safety: universal background checks, raising the age for firearms purchase to 21, requiring a waiting period, and barring civilian purchase of assault weapons.

The amendment to ease the way for troubled veterans to bypass the background check system, introduced by Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), would require the VA to withhold information from the criminal background check system unless "a relevant judicial authority rules that the beneficiary is a danger to himself or others,” adding an additional step that would discourage reporting.

The amendment would have languished like so many others in these chaotic weeks if Kennedy hadn’t played hardball. As a member of the powerful Appropriations Committee, he held up a crucial appropriations bill until he cut a deal with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to allow a vote on his amendment in exchange for lifting his hold on the long-delayed bill.

The sausage-making backfired for Schumer when the bill passed with the help of the three Democrats and two Democratic-aligned independents, all from states where any vote to restrict gun rights is electorally problematic—even one as reasonable as this one, where voting “No” would keep in place a provision that works, and that saves lives.

Family Reveals Suspected Gunman’s Link to Maine Massacre Sites

“I thought one of the few things we could all agree on is that people experiencing serious mental illness should not be able to buy guns,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) said in a statement after the amendment passed, calling the Senate vote “a death sentence for thousands of veterans across this country. More than 6,500 veterans die by firearm suicide every year. We have a duty of care for those who have sacrificed so much for our country, and today we failed them.”

The amendment’s author, Sen. Kennedy, sees it differently. “Veterans who sacrificed to defend our Constitution shouldn’t see their own rights rest on the judgment of unelected bureaucrats—but right now, they do,” he told Fox News Digital. “Every veteran who bravely serves our country has earned VA benefits, and it’s wrong for the government to punish veterans who get a helping hand to manage those resources.” (He was referring to veterans deemed unable to manage their finances being automatically categorized as incompetent to handle firearms.)

In the aftermath of the Maine shooting, the optics of this amendment may doom its passage. With the mid-November deadline looming and the prospect of more brinkmanship over funding the government, not everything can be crammed into the triple omnibus bill being crafted in the Senate. Schumer has control over what gets to the floor, and Kennedy and his co-sponsor, Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS), may conclude now is not the time to exempt troubled veterans from a background check if they’re in danger of harming themselves or others.

Schumer had called the amendment a “poison pill” before agreeing to bring it to the floor for a vote.

America’s Tragedy Is Its Culture of Fear—Armed With Millions of Guns

Democracy is full of tradeoffs. Gov. Newsom is all about gun control and at the same time, he’s supporting Jon Tester’s re-election and not holding against him a vote about which he has no choice in Montana, where the Dems need his seat.

Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME), a centrist Democrat who has voted against an assault weapons ban, is the rare lawmaker shaken enough by gun violence in his home state to change his position on assault weapons, a position, he said, that reflected in part “a false confidence that our community was above this, and that we could be in full control, among many other misjudgments.”

If that’s the measure of how we get gun safety, one Jared Golden at a time, it will take many more communities to suffer before there is any meaningful legislation. What happened in Maine—and what happened on the Senate floor—should be seen as a call to action for however long it takes for this madness to subside.

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