The Senate is set to begin voting on four gun control bills this evening, due largely to Sen. Chris Murphy’s (D-Conn.) filibuster that started last Wednesday afternoon and carried into the early morning the next day.
After one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history, Murphy said he’d had enough.
“This isn’t new to me, but I’m at my wit’s end,” he said, in likely reference both to the recent slaughter in Orlando as well as to the Sandy Hook massacre that occurred in his home state in 2012, leaving 26 dead, most of them 6- and 7-year-olds.
“I’ve had enough of the ongoing slaughter of innocents, and I’ve had enough of inaction in this body.”
In protest of the Senate’s inaction, he took the floor for nearly 15 hours, joined by a handful of other Democratic senators, saying that he would stop talking only once he received some sign that gun violence legislation would come to the floor of the Republican-led Senate for a vote.
Murphy got his wish, and tonight, the Senate is scheduled to vote on four related bills.
Two of the proposals deal with background checks for gun sales. The Republican plan is aimed at updating and streamlining the National Instant Criminal Background Checks System, while the Democratic counter-plan would require background checks for all gun sales, closing the so-called “gun show loophole.”
The other two bills, highly relevant in the wake of the Orlando massacre, address gun sales to people who are on the terrorist watch list. The Democratic plan would block suspected terrorists from purchasing guns, an approach President Obama endorsed during a taping at PBS NewsHour on June 2.
Republicans, however, have expressed worries that blocking people from exercising their Second Amendment right without due process would be unconstitutional, a sentiment Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) raised in question form to Murphy during his filibuster. The Republican counter-proposal would thus only block a gun sale to a suspected terrorist if a judge found probable cause, a barrier Democrats have said requires too high a burden of proof.
Because of procedural rules in the Senate, any bill would need 60 votes to advance, a highly unlikely scenario given the divisive character of debates on gun legislation and the fact that this being an election year, compromise appears improbable. Versions of all four of the bills have at some point already been brought to a vote in the Senate, and all failed to pass.
Despite the likely lack of progress on updating U.S. gun laws, a full 89 percent of Americans support closing the gun show loophole, including 84 percent of households that own guns, according to Quinnipiac University poll results released in December.
That same poll showed that a majority of Americans supported an outright ban on assault weapons (58 percent).
Omar Mateen, the perpetrator of the Orlando massacre, legally purchased both of the guns that he used, despite being suspected of terrorist ties beginning in 2013.
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