After his wife’s shooting, Kelly soon became one of the nation’s most prominent advocates for gun-safety legislation, founding with her a political group named in her honor and devoted to the cause. His victorious 2020 campaign to fill the remainder of the late Senator John McCain’s term gave Kelly a far more powerful platform to shape federal gun laws. Yet as Congress prepares to enact the most significant gun-control bill in more than 25 years, Kelly is standing only at the periphery of the action. He was one of 20 senators who quickly endorsed the bipartisan framework that became the basis for legislation, but he did not play a major role in its formation and did not serve as a key negotiator. Instead, the leading Democrats behind the bill were Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Kelly’s Arizona colleague, Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who has forged close ties with Republicans in part because of her willingness to buck her own party.
Kelly’s absence from the formal talks is a surprise, especially considering that he is running this fall for a full Senate term in a race that could determine whether Democrats maintain control of the chamber. “I would think this would be a great issue for him,” Chuck Coughlin, a veteran Republican consultant in Arizona, told me. Although Arizona has some of the nation’s most permissive gun laws, Coughlin said that the incremental changes in the Senate compromise—including an expansion of background checks for young adults and federal funding to implement red-flag laws—were likely to be popular with voters and offered Kelly an opportunity to “put Republicans on the defensive.” “There’s significant pluralities of voters across party lines that would support the bill,” Coughlin said.
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