A bipartisan group of senators has announced they have reached a deal on modest changes to the nation’s gun laws. Lawmakers still need to write the details into law, which won’t necessarily be easy. But with 10 GOP senators onboard — enough to break a filibuster if all 50 Democrats are onboard — prospects for passage are strong. The deal pairs expanded background checks for some gun purchasers with new resources for mental health and school security, among other provisions.
Despite several mass shootings last month, beginning with a massacre in a Buffalo grocery store and ending with a school shooting in Uvalde, Tex., few expected Congress to take any action to limit gun violence. So how did the bipartisan deal come together?
Watch the closing doors
In polarized times, when there is strong public support for congressional action, legislators approach things differently than when there’s an appetite for compromise. In this case, that involved two things. First, rather than looking for a single ideological sweet spot that both parties favored, each party secured some of their most favored provisions. Key negotiators, Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and John Cornyn (R-Tex.) — both from states where a gunman killed elementary schoolchildren — spearheaded negotiations, yielding a package that paired at least some of the enhanced background checks favored by Democrats with the expanded funding for school security demanded by Republicans.
Second, senators negotiated behind closed doors. A lack of transparency might be critical: It allows each party to discuss concessions that would outrage their base voters if they learned what their lawmakers were ready to give away. If activists knew Democrats were ready to settle for limited expansion of background checks, they’d likely pressure their senators to walk away. That’s why lawmakers often try to follow the adage: “Nothing is agreed to until everything is agreed to.” Getting there requires keeping the public largely in the dark.
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Persistent headlines
Attention to gun violence — even the massacre of elementary schoolchildren — rarely stays in the headlines for long. Intense media attention typically soon fades. Economist Anthony Downs coined the phrase the “issue attention cycle”: A dramatic event like a shooting attracts reporters’ attention, generates a lot of coverage and then fades from the headlines as the news media move on to the next crisis. Although majorities of Americans across party lines favor action to tighten gun regulations, public attention to the issue tends to be just as fleeting as the media’s.
However, this time, reporters have stayed on the story — arresting the issue attention cycle. Alarming headlines about the Uvalde shooting suggest local police took too long to enter the building to confront the killer while schoolchildren were still being shot. Texas authorities called the local police response a failure. A recently announced federal investigation has also prolonged the news media’s — and thus the public’s — attention, perhaps keeping more pressure than usual on legislators to revamp gun regulations.
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GOP’s electoral gambit
Even if the deal can be swiftly written into a bill, we don’t know yet how broadly Senate Republicans will support it. But regardless of whether Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and other conservatives vote for it, this time seems different: McConnell has a strong electoral incentive to have his party on the side of at least incrementally tightening federal gun laws.
Control of the Senate is in reach for Republicans in the November elections. Signing on to a deal that is likely to be broadly favored by suburban voters in tightly contested states (including Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania) might be just what the doctor ordered to broaden the GOP’s appeal.
If that’s right, Republicans had a strong electoral incentive to go to the bargaining table and stay there long enough to put together a deal: GOP electoral fortunes in the Senate could ride in part on their cooperation.
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