The Senate’s proposed gun-control bill crashed and burned earlier this month, and Majority Leader Harry Reid signaled that he was going to put the issue on the political shelf where it would presumably start to gather dust — but that might not be the case after all. Senator Manchin and Toomey revealed last week that they’re going to keep looking for ways to strengthen Senate support for the measures, and Machin confirmed that he’s optimistc that he can fix their mistakes from the last go-around and introduce a background check-centric, cleaner version of the bill:
Another senator this week also suggested that perhaps Harry Reid’s shelving of gun-control legislation isn’t so indefinite after all, via The Hill:
Although legislation central to President Obama’s effort to reduce gun violence was blocked this month in the upper chamber, Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.) said this week that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has told House gun control advocates that the legislation will resurface before 2014.
“Reid had already told us [last week] that they were definitely going to bring it back up again,” McCarthy said Friday. “We don’t know when that time will be, but he said before the end of the year.” …
“We do know that a number of senators have been reaching out to our workforce group, and they were going ahead, they’re going to tweak it, they’re going to see, you know, if they can work with some of the other members who voted ‘no,'” McCarthy said.
I would think that, if they’re really going to try this again, they’d definitely want to do it sooner than later so that they have ample time to cleanse voters’ palates before the midterms next November — but convincing the four Democratic senators who voted against the measure as well as finding one more Republican to go along with it still seems like a long shot.
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