A decade ago, when 20 children and six adults were killed at an elementary school in Connecticut, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell extended his thoughts and prayers, mourning a tragedy he said “stands out in its awfulness” — and then used the filibuster to block a bipartisan bill to toughen gun laws.
But last month, after a gunman in Uvalde, Texas, murdered 19 elementary school children and two teachers, McConnell did something different: he said Congress should act, and gave Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, his blessing to cut a deal with Democrats on modestly stricter gun laws, which he endorsed on Tuesday.
McConnell’s shift reflects a new political paradigm as mass shootings become more frequent in the United States. Permissive gun laws have allowed easy access to AR-15-style rifles, including for dangerous people who aim to commit murder. The Kentucky Republican also has a political incentive: Winning back suburban voters, who support gun control but have drifted away from the GOP coalition and toward Democrats in recent elections.
For McConnell — a longstanding opponent of gun control, who has branded himself the “grim reaper” of progressive priorities — an openness to a gun bill also reflects his desire to show the Senate can work with the 60-vote filibuster rule intact. A GOP leadership aide familiar with his thinking said it’d prove the Senate is “not broken” and that “those who want to change the rules are wrong.”
The final bill has yet to be written, but many senators in both parties sound optimistic, with the framework deal alone marking a sea change after nearly three decades of failure to address gun violence.
“There’s no question that the school shootings have represented a change in the environment,” Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, a former Republican presidential candidate in 2012, told NBC News in an interview. “That has made a lot of us say: Are there some things we can do that do not infringe on the rights of gun owners — but at the same time, make it more difficult for disturbed young people to commit acts of such horror?”
McConnell is attuned to the political trends as he seeks to win Senate control for Republicans in the midterm election this fall.
One day after the 2020 election, he said he’s “disturbed by the loss of support in the suburbs” for GOP candidates. “If you look at our situation, the Republican situation nationally, I think we need to win back the suburbs. We need to do better with college-educated voters than we’re doing lately, and we need to do better with women.”
In a CBS News poll taken this month, 69 percent of American women said gun laws should be more strict (6 percent said less strict); and 65 percent of white college graduates said they should be more strict (10 percent said less strict). And the status quo isn’t appealing to them: Just a quarter of women and white college graduates said gun laws should stay the same.
“McConnell can read the polls as well as anyone. There’s broad public support for doing something given the magnitude of the tragedy in Uvalde,” said Dan Eberhart, a Republican donor and oil and gas executive.
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