A10 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MAY 29 , 2022
later, The Post reported on a
whistleblower complaint about
Trump’s communications with a
foreign leader, eventually leading
to Trump’s first impeachment for
his efforts to withhold military
aid to Ukraine — drawing
Trump’s attention away from
guns.‘Words simply fail’
This past Wednesday, the day
after the devastating Uvalde el-
ementary school shooting, Mc-
Connell — now the Senate minor-
ity leader again — took to the
Senate floor to declare himself
and the nation “sickened and
outraged by the senseless evil”
that left at least 19 students and
two teachers “murdered for no
apparent reason at all.”
He did not mention guns or
any possible legislation, instead
focusing on the “innocent young
lives” that were prematurely ex-
tinguished.
“Words simply fail,” McConnell
said.
On Thursday, however, Mc-
Connell tasked Cornyn with ne-
gotiating with Democrats.
“Maybe this will provide some
impetus” for compromise,
Cornyn told reporters at the Capi-
tol on Thursday. “This is horrible.
Hard to imagine anything that
could be worse than parents wor-
rying about the safety of their
kids going to school.”
But most Republicans signaled
in recent days that major legisla-
tion remains unlikely.
“There are no right words to
describe the heartbreaking and
horrific tragedy that happened at
Robb Elementary School,” said
Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), be-
fore adding later: “We must be
thoughtful about how we discuss
and handle school safety and
mental health issues. Federal
changes should not be made in
haste, and there’s still many de-
tails we do not know as the
investigation continues.”
After a vigil for the Uvalde
victims, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.)
stormed away from an interview
when a British reporter asked
him why mass shootings happen
“only in America.” Cruz accused
the reporter of having a “political
agenda.”
Cruz also dismissed Democrat-
ic gun violence prevention pro-
posals, saying that none of them
would have stopped the Uvalde
shooting, and later suggested leg-
islation to “harden schools” —
such as having only one usable
door.
On Friday, Trump — still the de
facto leader of the Republican
Party — joined other Republican
officials in delivering a defiant
response to the Uvalde massacre
at an NRA annual meeting in
Houston, arguing that new gun
restrictions were pointless.
Support for stricter gun laws
has increased after mass shoot-
ings at schools. In March 2018,
shortly after the Parkland shoot-
ing, 67 percent said in a Gallup
Poll that laws should be more
strict — an increase from 60
percent who said the same in
October 2017. Similarly, support
for stricter laws jumped from 43
percent to 58 percent after the
Sandy Hook shooting.
In contrast to support for gun
restrictions in general, support
for expanding background
checks has stayed very high over
time. A Pew Research Center poll
last year found 81 percent of
Americans supported making
private gun sales and sales at gun
shows subject to background
checks, including 70 percent of
Republicans and 92 percent of
Democrats. A 63 percent majori-
ty supported a ban on assault-
style weapons, including 83 per-
cent of Democrats and less than
half as many Republicans (
percent).
But many gun-control advo-
cates and Democrats remain
skeptical that Republicans are
prepared to change their ap-
proach. Matt Bennett — a co-
founder of Third Way, a Demo-
cratic think tank — said polarized
politics prevents the handful of
Republicans who may privately
support some gun safety laws to
do so publicly.
“The ones who believe in their
hearts that they should do some-
thing — and who knows how
many there truly are — don’t
want to do it, because they don’t
want to get crosswise with the
base,” Bennett said.
John Feinblatt, the president
of Everytown for Gun Safety,
latched onto McConnell’s decla-
ration on the Senate floor that
“words simply fail.”
He said he agrees completely.
“I don’t want to mince words.
The Republican senators are
what is costing American lives.
And McConnell is the head of the
Republican Senate,” Feinblatt
said. “I am encouraged that Mc-
Connell gave the green light to
Cornyn. That is what I would call
step one.”
“But,” he added, “There is no
question about it: Inaction is not
an option.”Emily Guskin, Colby Itkowitz, Alice
Crites and Laura Meckler
contributed to this report.stitutional right to keep and bear
arms,” McConnell said in the
recording. “Their efforts to re-
strict your rights, invading your
personal privacy and overstep-
ping their bounds with executive
orders, is just plain wrong.”
McConnell also refused a
meeting with the Sandy Hook
families, according to someone
familiar with the request, who
spoke on the condition of ano-
nymity to reveal details. But
eventually, Sen. Joe Manchin III
(D-W.Va.) and Sen. Patrick J.
Toomey (R-Pa.) negotiated a
modest bipartisan background
checks bill, known as Manchin-
Toomey.
At the time, McConnell was
still adjusting to the rise of the
hard-right tea party movement in
the Republican base; in the 2010
Republican Senate primary in
Kentucky, Rand Paul vanquished
Trey Grayson, McConnell’s hand-
picked candidate, by riding the
tea party wave in what some also
viewed as a stinging rebuke of
McConnell. And by 2013, McCon-
nell was already preparing for his
2014 reelection bid.
When Manchin-Toomey finally
came to the Senate floor for a voteThe Standard Gravure massa-
cre provided an early glimpse of
how McConnell — now the Re-
publican Senate minority leader
— would handle mass shootings
and their aftermath over the next
three decades, consistently work-
ing to delay, obstruct or prevent
most major gun-control legisla-
tion from passing Congress.
McConnell would go on to
follow a similar playbook time
and time again during his seven
terms in Congress, offering vague
promises of action, often without
any specifics, only to be followed
by no action or incremental mea-
sures that avoided new gun regu-
lations. As a Republican leader,
he also helped dissuade his con-
ference — as after the 2012 mass
shooting at Sandy Hook Elemen-
tary School in Newtown, Conn. —
from supporting gun legislation
and, as majority leader, refused
to bring up significant gun-con-
trol measures for a vote.
Now, the latest devastating
and high-profile mass shootings
— a massacre Tuesday at Robb
Elementary School in Uvalde,
Tex., that left 19 students and two
teachers dead, just 10 days after a
racist slaughter at Buffalo super-
market that killed 10 — have
thrust Congress back into a fiery
debate over what, if anything,
lawmakers can do to curb gun
violence.
On Thursday, McConnell told
CNN that he had encouraged Sen.
John Cornyn (R-Tex.) to reach out
to Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.)
and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) —
who made gun control a personal
project after Sandy Hook — to
begin discussing what bipartisan
measures might be possible.
But many Democrats and anti-
gun advocates remain skeptical,
predicting that McConnell and
his fellow Republicans are poised
to obstruct any consequential
gun-violence-prevention bills yet
again.
“If there’s any one individual in
the United States to blame for our
inability to put things in place to
prevent gun violence, it’s Mitch
McConnell,” said Peter Ambler,
the executive director of Giffords,
a group devoted to fighting gun
violence. “McConnell under-
stands he’s hostage to that ex-
treme base that just doesn’t toler-
ate any departure from any of
their views.”
Many Republicans say that
McConnell is less a singular ob-
stacle than a savvy leader who is
able to his read his conference
and make decisions that help his
senators and protect them politi-
cally. “McConnell knows where
his members stand and makes
the tough calls to protect their
interests,” a senior Republican
aide said, explaining McConnell’s
overall motivations in addressing
gun violence and gun legislation.
McConnell declined to com-
ment.
In 1990, the year after the
Standard Gravure shooting, Mc-
Connell was up for reelection and
found himself in a close race with
Democrat Harvey Sloane, then
the Jefferson County judge execu-
tive and a former Louisville may-
or, who had called for banning
assault weapons.
In 2013, following Sandy Hook,
Sloane recounted in Louisville’s
Courier-Journal newspaper that
as his race with McConnell tight-
ened in the final stretch, McCon-
nell and the National Rifle Asso-
ciation “blistered the state falsely
as to how this ban would even-
tually take away ‘your hunting
gun and the hand pistol you need
for personal protection.’ ”
McConnell defeated Sloane by
five percentage points and, in his
second term in the Senate, went
on to vote against both the Brady
Handgun Violence Prevention
Act in 1993 and the Federal
Assault Weapons Ban in 1994.
“Mitch is really Machiavel-
lian,” Sloane said in an interview
with The Washington Post last
week. “He’s single-handedly held
up any kind of gun legislation
that’s meaningful.”
‘It didn’t change a thing’
In September 2019, a group of
gun-control advocates — includ-
ing Kris Brown, the president of
Brady, a gun violence prevention
organization; Rep. John Lewis
(D-Ga.), a civil rights icon; and
Rep. Lucy McBath (D-Ga.), who
lost her 17-year-old son in a 2012
shooting — gathered on the West
Lawn of the Capitol for a rally in
favor of tougher background
checks.
After the rally, some in the
group — which also included
some McConnell constituents —
decided to make their way to the
then-majority leader’s office for
MCCONNELL FROM A
A 3-decade
career
foiling
gun control
Parkland, he called for “compre-
hensive” gun legislation and
chided Republicans for being
“petrified” of the NRA. But the
next day, he hosted an NRA
lobbyist in the Oval Office, de-
clared the meeting “great” on
Twitter and seemed to lose inter-
est in working on gun legislation.
Still, a McConnell aide said,
the combination of the Florida
and Kentucky school shootings
prompted McConnell, by then
the Senate majority leader, to
help pass two modest bills on
background checks (the Fix NICS
Act) and school safety (the Stop
School Violence Act).
The Fix NICS Act helped im-
prove the criminal background
checks system to make back-
ground checks more thorough
and accurate, and the stopping
school violence measure author-
ized additional funding for im-
proving school security and early
intervention and school violence
prevention programs.
Another big push for gun legis-
lation came in the summer of
2019, following back-to-back
shootings on Aug. 3 and 4 at a
Walmart Supercenter in majori-
ty-Hispanic El Paso and in a
nightlife corridor in Dayton,
Ohio, which left a combined 23
people dead and dozens more
injured.
The Democratic blowback was
fierce and directed squarely at
McConnell — who was again
campaigning for reelection —
since the House had already
passed a background check bill.
“I hope that Sen. McConnell
would bring the Senate back
tomorrow and pass the back-
ground check bill and send it to
the president,” Ohio Democratic
Sen. Sherrod Brown said after the
shootings.
The same day, Shannon Watts
of Moms Demand Action, a gun
violence prevention group, de-
clared, “We need Mitch McCon-
nell to allow a vote.”
The Twitter account of House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)
retweeted both statements, and
several days later, Pelosi wrote a
public letter to Trump asking him
to call on McConnell — whom she
described as “an obstacle to tak-
ing any action” — to call the
Senate back into session.
By the night of Aug. 4, protest-
ers had gathered outside McCon-
nell’s Kentucky home with pro-
fane chants. Days later, dozens
gathered outside his Louisville
office.
That Thursday, Aug. 8, McCon-
nell went on Louisville’s WHAS-
AM radio to say he had spoken
with Trump and was ready to
take action. The president, he
said, was “anxious to get an
outcome, and so am I.”
“What we can’t do is fail to pass
something,” McConnell said.
“What I want to see here is an
outcome.”
He added that background
checks — which he said had “a lot
of support” publicly — and red
flag measures would probably
lead the discussion.
But a special session was never
called.
The week before returning to
Washington, McConnell did an
interview with Hugh Hewitt on
Sept. 3 that laid out a different
benchmark, deferring to Trump:
“I said several weeks ago that if
the president took a position on a
bill so that we knew we would
actually be making a law and not
just having serial votes, I’d be
happy to put it on the floor.”
By the time McConnell
brought the Senate back in ses-
sion, his focus had shifted. In his
first remarks on the Senate floor,
McConnell made no mention of
the gun issue. Just over a weekin April 2013, McConnell pushed
his conference to oppose the bill,
which ultimately failed 54 to 46,
falling short of the 60 votes
needed for passage.
“McConnell whipped hard
against it. McConnell is obsessed
with protecting his right flank,”
said Adam Jentleson, who at the
time worked for then-Senate Ma-
jority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-
Nev.), explaining why McConnell
helped tank the background
check bill. “It’s why he’s been able
to survive as leader for so long.”
Jesse Benton — a conservative
activist who managed Paul’s 2010
Senate campaign and who Mc-
Connell enlisted to manage his
2014 one — said that McConnell
at the time “said something to me
like, ‘I hope you know I’m not
planning on supporting any of
this crap.' ”
“He’s not a firebrand like some
of the [pro-gun] activists want,
but he makes it clear to his team
that he is a Second Amendment
believer,” Benton said. “He re-
spects the legislative process and
the fact that there are differing
opinions in his own caucus, but
he works it in his own way, as
only he can.”
McConnell was, at other times,
willing to entertain the idea of
some legislation on guns, partly
as a way of releasing pressure
from members of his caucus who
wanted to show some legislative
action after mass shootings.
But that approach has also
earned him the ire of some Sec-
ond Amendment advocates,
some of whom ran ads against
him during his 2014 primary.
“When the going gets tough,
Mitch McConnell has always
been absent from the fight,” said
Dudley Brown, the president of
the National Association for Gun
Rights, a hard-line alternative to
the NRA. “He has never stood up
when it was really tough.”‘A n obstacle to taking any
action’
For McConnell, 2018 opened
with a mass shooting at Marshall
County High School near Benton,
Ky., where a 15-year-old student
killed two and injured more than
a dozen others that January. The
following month, another school
shooting at Marjory Stoneman
Douglas High School in Parkland,
Fla., left 17 dead and drew yet
another national outcry for
stronger gun measures.
At the time, Trump offered
messaging whiplash. In a meet-
ing with Democratic and Repub-
lican lawmakers two weeks afterwhat Lewis might have called
“good trouble.”
“So we walked over, John Lew-
is kind of leading us, talking
about the importance of peaceful
resistance,” Brown recalled, add-
ing that Lewis asked if someone
should get Depends — a brand of
adult diapers — because the
group might be there for a while.
“His staffers had no idea what
to do with us,” Brown said. “Mc-
Connell didn’t have the human
decency to sit down with John
Lewis.”
Instead, a McConnell staffer
ushered the group into a confer-
ence room and met with them for
over an hour. Brown said that the
staffer clearly seemed moved by
Lewis, telling him that she held
him in high esteem, and by the
victims of gun violence, who re-
counted their stories one after
another.
“She was moved to tears, but it
didn’t change a thing,” Brown
said, saying the staffer essentially
told the group “that it was just
the wrong time to bring this bill
forward.”
Doug Andres, a McConnell
spokesman, said McConnell had
been unable to meet with the
group at the time because it was a
surprise visit and he already had
constituent meetings planned.
He said the staffer simply ex-
plained to the group that then-
President Donald Trump was un-
likely to sign the bill they were
pitching, and McConnell was not
going to advocate for legislation
he knew would fail.
For McConnell, however, the
time has rarely seemed right.
Almost immediately after San-
dy Hook, then-President Barack
Obama tasked then-Vice Presi-
dent Joe Biden with putting to-
gether a robust policy response.
McConnell — then the Senate
minority leader — downplayed
the effort.
Asked about gun-control is-
sues on ABC’s “This Week” in
January 2013 — less than month
after Sandy Hook — McConnell
said he was waiting to see Biden’s
proposal but did not plan to
prioritize it over other issues like
“spending and debt” in the com-
ing months.
Then, later that month — after
Obama signed 23 executive or-
ders on guns in response to the
tragedy that left 20 kindergart-
ners dead — McConnell recorded
a robocall and sent it out to gun
owners in his state.
“President Obama and his
team are doing everything in
their power to restrict your con-SUSAN WALSH/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) holds a rifle in 2014 before speaking at the Conservative Political Action Committee’s conference. Over
three decades, McConnell has consistently worked to delay, obstruct or prevent most major gun-control legislation from passing Congress.MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES
Students protest in front of McConnell’s office in 2018 after the massacre in Parkland, Fla. Two modest
bills were passed: one on background checks and one on school safety.Many Republicans saythat McConnell is less asingular obstacle than asavvy leader who isable to his read hisconference.“If there’s any oneindividual ... to blamefor our inability to putthings in place toprevent gun violence,it’s Mitch McConnell.”
Peter Ambler, Giffords executive