After El Paso, Dayton shootings, my old Republican colleagues still won't act on guns

Over a weekend that claimed the lives of at least 31 people in mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, we hear the familiar refrain: “Why won’t Washington do something?” I spent 16 years in the House of Representatives trying to get something done on gun violence. Nothing happened. I became so frustrated that I wrote a political novel on the issue, "Big Guns," to try to answer the question truthfully. 

Yesterday, President Trump provided yet another unsatisfactory answer. Reading from a teleprompter in the White House Diplomatic Reception Room, he condemned white supremacy but stopped short of supporting any meaningful gun safety initiatives.

In my 16 years in Congress, there were 52 mass shootings in America, according to an analysis by Mother Jones. This included Pulse nightclub in Orlando; Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston; the Century Aurora 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colorado; and Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

After each one, I confronted the question “Why won’t Washington do something?” in my suburban Long Island district. It came from both Democrats and Republicans, gun safety advocates and NRA members. They may have disagreed on exactly what should be done, but there were three solutions which attracted broad consensus: strengthening background checks, banning "cop-killing" bullets, and “no fly, no buy” — prohibiting people who are deemed too dangerous to fly in airplanes from acquiring guns.

Inaction is motivated by selfish fear

Despite very favorable polling on these common-sense and common-ground issues, nothing happened on Capitol Hill.

Why?

The tragic, maddening fact is that too many members of Congress fear the wrath of the gun lobby more than they fear a crazed gunman in a Walmart. They tweet condolences and lower flags and call for moments of silence. Then they wait for the anguish to die down so that you’ll forget their fecklessness and vote for them in the next election.

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I remember trying to pass variations of these measures in the House Appropriations Committee. It was an annual ritual. My colleagues and I would offer amendments to strengthen background checks and we offered “no fly, no buy” amendments to appropriation bills. They failed. We offered amendments and attempted to repeal the so-called Dickey Amendment, which curtails the ability of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from compiling and analyzing the public health consequences of gun violence. We lost.

You may know all of this, but what you probably don’t know is what often happened after these votes. Many of my colleagues would admit that they personally agreed with these measures, they just couldn’t vote for them without risking political repercussions back home. The tally on their minds wasn’t just the more than 30,000 names of Americans who die by gun deaths annually, it was their gun lobby legislative scorecard, where anything less than 100% was considered “anti-gun.”

Republicans feared a Republican primary, and nothing motivates primary voters more than a “weak” record on guns. In the case of Democrats who opposed these measures (only a handful), they worried that antagonizing pro-gun voters was the one fatal Republican political attack they couldn’t survive.

And so it continues.

The gun lobby will wait us out

As I wrote in The New York Times after the Oct. 1, 2017 shooting in Las Vegas that left 58 people murdered, it’s a numbing cycle with all the predictability of an old television rerun.

First, we are shocked by the shooting. The media shows the same images: survivors embracing, crime scene tape drooping, grainy photos of the perpetrator, the politicians ringing a podium. Next, the flags lower, there’s the obligatory tweeting of thoughts and prayers, the outraged calls for action, the rising sense that this time — this time— something will be done.

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Finally, the news fades, the distractions take hold, you turn the page or click a different link or news channel. Congress is gripped by a budget deal or a fiscal cliff or a repugnant tweet or something else. Within a week, maybe longer, hardly anyone remembers Las Vegas or Aurora or Orlando or San Bernardino or Gilroy or Virginia Beach or Thousand Oaks or Pittsburgh or Santa Fe or Parkland or Sutherland Springs or Newtown, or the many, many others.

The only people who can’t escape the memory are the ones who buried a child or parent or teacher or student or co-worker or friend. 

And finally, within days, months — or maybe even within 24 hours — it happens again. We hear eyewitnesses express shock that it happened to them; in their hometown. And hear, again, the anguished questions about why Washington won’t act on the things we mostly agree on.

Until the next shooting. The one after that. The one again, and again, and again. 

It’s exactly what the gun industry and its lobby expect and count on. They will wait you out. 

Think about that when you read past this article. Think about it next week when the words “Dayton” and “El Paso” are supplanted by cable news hosts frothing at another presidential tweet.

The problem isn’t really lawmakers with a narrow and self-serving view. It’s voters with short memories. 

Steve Israel is a former Democratic congressman from New York and author of the book, "Big Guns." Follow him on Twitter: @RepSteveIsrael