Oprah Pushes for Background Checks at Harvard Commencement
Listen up, America: Oprah wants background checks.
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If today, from midnight to midnight, was the time period from Newtown to now, how much violence would have transpired in the time it took you to open this story? This much.
Listen up, America: Oprah wants background checks.
When Senator Mark Pryor voted against a gun background check compromise, he was taking a measured political risk. Even as an anti-gun group announces a plan to spend $350,000 on ads criticizing Pryor ahead of a near-certain second vote, a detailed new poll shows why it may have made political sense.
The number of crimes committed with firearms has dropped significantly since the early 1990s. The data also offers both advocates and opponents of expanded gun measures fodder for their arguments, and rationalization for their votes.
Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona appears to be reversing his opposition to expanded background checks on gun purchases. It's another sign that the tide is shifting in the gun debate, even as advocates continue to apply pressure.
As Congress returns to a continued hiatus in the Senate's push for a return to expanded gun control legislation, opponents of new measures have hunkered down while advocates of stronger laws desperately look for a way back in.
There will be an aspect of the NRA's convention — which opens today with an all-star list of speakers — that feels like a victory celebration. But after steamrolling over an ineffectual Organizing For Action, the NRA may have met its toughest opponent: Public Policy Polling.
There are more indicators that last month's Senate vote on expanding background checks was something of a dress rehearsal. Another vote appears to be brewing. Americans support the idea — as, apparently, do some Senators who opposed it last time.
Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia hasn't given up on passing an expansion of background checks on gun sales. With polls showing senators taking a hit for opposing the measure, the gight is on to convince their constituents they did the right thing.
On its front page today, The New York Times criticizes President Obama for failing to hold Democrats who voted against the gun compromise accountable. But the president's bigger challenge may have been overestimating their empathy.
The Arizona Republican senator told her, in a handwritten letter, that "strengthening background checks is something we agree on." A few days later, background checks was not something they could agree on, because he voted to filibuster the bill.
And it could have been worse: Just over ten percent of Americans can block any federal legislation from moving forward, according to our compilation of data.
President Obama will not get his vote on gun control in the Senate on Wednesday. Or, at least, not on a package of bills that could pass. The Manchin-Toomey compromise on background checks has been declared dead by its sponsor.
The store that sold Nancy Lanza the gun that her son used to kill her ended up losing its license to sell firearms six days after the shooting, new documents reveal. Not because of the massacre conducted by Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary — because of violations stretching back way before Nancy Lanza ever entered the shop.
Just shy of four months after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the full Senate voted for the first time in 19 years to consider major reforms to gun legislation. Here's what the data tells us about what might happen next.
Opponents criticize Wednesday's background check compromise, suggesting it wouldn't have prevented several high profile mass shootings. Indeed, of the 30 incidents since 2003 that we looked at, the new deal would quite possibly only have stopped one.
The planned GOP filibuster of gun-control legislation was losing steam on Tuesday, as more than half a dozen GOP lawmakers abandoned their conservative colleagues' effort to block consideration of the bill.
As is usually the case in DC, we can predict the outcome of the Senate's vote on gun measures a few weeks before the vote happens. One of the only question marks — universal background checks — may also be resolved, thanks to a big name. Not Bloomberg. McCain.
Only two things have really changed in the push by Senate Democrats to enact a slate of new gun legislation. The first is that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid saved a little face. The second is that a vote isn't coming until April. What hasn't changed is that the Senate is a broken institution.
Nine of the ten days with the most daily requested FBI background checks in history have occurred since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary — including the day of the tragedy itself. Newtown itself has seen gun permits more than double.
The partisan divide on proposed gun legislation has only sharpened in the 90 days since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, and votes in the Senate's Judiciary Committee now suggest that high-profile reforms — from the most controversial to the most popular — may be in more trouble than anyone might have imagined.
Universal background check legislation is stumbling forward in the U.S. Senate and collapsing in state legislatures, despite still-strong poll numbers. But the conventional wisdom on just how many American gun sales go unchecked might be based on a myth.
Schumer's place-holder bill emerged from the Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, but on a narrow, party-line vote. That leaves Schumer searching for an authentically conservative co-sponsor who might provide some cover on background checks.
America's two largest publicly traded gun manufacturers announced massive earnings boosts this week, thanks, as you might expect, to America's massive boost in gun buying. Here's a look at the numbers against FBI background checks, with charts.
The most broadly supported component of legislation aimed at curbing gun violence, universal background checks, may not make it into the Senate's "best chance at legislative consensus" on firearms because, after all, this is Congress we're talking about.
A new poll conducted by The New York Times and CBS News says that one of the most popular initiatives being pushed by gun control advocates is pretty popular among gun owners too.
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