Last spring, in the wake of the shocking murder of 20 schoolchildren in Newtown, Connecticut, a bill that would have required background checks for all commercial sales of guns came up for a vote in the U.S. Senate. Already, in the weeks and months after Sandy Hook, brave talk of reinstating a ban on semiautomatic “assault” weapons, limiting magazines, or establishing a national registry of gun owners had proved to be a liberal fever-dream. But the Senate bill, introduced by Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Republican Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, would simply have extended federally required background checks of gun buyers to gun show and Internet sales, not just purchases from dealers. Still, the bill failed: A majority of senators voted in favor of it—54—but 60 votes were needed to overcome a threatened GOP filibuster.
The bill wasn’t completely one-sided. It included a carrot to private-show gun sellers in exchange for the more onerous background-check obligation: the same immunity from civil suits that had been granted to pretty much the rest of the gun industry eight years ago. Including that provision was a sign of just how entrenched the industry’s protections have become. Amid the potential responses to the Newtown shootings floated on Capitol Hill, few members even mentioned repealing or scaling back the 2005 law that largely shielded gun manufacturers and dealers from lawsuits and resulted in several large-scale suits against the industry being thrown out.
