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WASHINGTON (AP) — One day after the demise of gun control legislation, Senate supporters of the measure vowed to try again, while a leading opponent accused President Barack Obama of taking the “low road” when he harshly criticized lawmakers who voted against key provisions.
“When good and honest people have honest differences of opinion about what policies the country should pursue about gun rights…the president of the United States should not accuse them of having no coherent arguments or of caving to the pressure,” saidSen. John Cornyn, R-Texas.
The fate of the bill was sealed in a string of votes on Wednesday, when Republicans backed by a small group of rural-state Democrats rejected more extensive background checks for gun purchasers and also torpedoed proposed bans on assault weapons and high capacity ammunition clips.
The Senate delivered its verdict four months after a shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., left 20 first graders and six school aides dead. The tragedy prompted Obama to champion an issue that Democrats had largely avoided for two decades, and that he himself ignored during his first term in the White House.
Two additional votes were set for later in the day, but they were on relatively minor provisions, and the bill itself was moribund for the foreseeable future.
Cornyn said he agreed with Obama that Wednesday had been a shameful day, but added it was because of the president’s own comments, rather than the events on the Senate floor.
“He could have taken the high road…instead he chose to take the low road and I agree with him it was a truly shameful day.”
Cornyn spoke shortly after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the struggle for tougher gun legislation was not over.
“This is not the end of the fight. Republicans are in an unsustainable position,” he said, after voting with few exceptions against a tougher requirement for background checks for gun purchasers, a proposal that shows very high support in most public opinion polls.
Reid offered no timetable for renewing the drive to enact legislation that Obama has placed near the top of his domestic agenda.
Another Democrat, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, said the proposed expansion of background checks that he co-authored would have passed easily had it not been for the National Rifle Association’s decision to take the vote into account in deciding which candidates to support or oppose in 2014.
“If they hadn’t scored it, we’d have had 70 votes,” he said. Instead, it drew 54, six short of the 60 needed to advance.
Manchin also told reporters at a breakfast sponsored by the Wall Street Journal that the outcome would have been different if the Senate had acted more quickly after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown. “If we’d have gone to a bill like this immediately, boom,” he said, predicting it would have received 65-70 votes.
Obama spoke in clipped, angry tones at the White House on Wednesday after the Senate scuttled legislation he had campaign for energetically.
“I see this as just Round One,” the president said, flanked by relatives of Newtown’s victims and former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head in Tucson, Ariz., in 2011.
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