Just a few months had passed since Ben Wheeler was slaughtered by
a gunman with an AR-15 at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and his mother
was on Capitol Hill pleading with a U.S. senator to understand her
grief.
Francine Wheeler wanted to know what Sen. Heidi Heitkamp would do if it had been her 6-year-old child who was murdered.
“She
would not look at me,” Wheeler recalled recently about the April 2013
encounter with the newly elected Democrat from North Dakota, a
conservative state with deep support for gun rights. Heitkamp was
“defensive, unkind, and not interested in helping or listening to the
stories of our loved ones.”
When
the session ended, Heitkamp stayed in her office “sitting at the table
with her head down,” recalled David Thomas, a lobbyist who escorted
Wheeler and other Sandy Hook parents to the meeting. As the entourage
left, Lara Bergthold, another consultant helping the families, said she
heard the senator “break out into sobs.”
Over
the course of nine wrenching days that spring, mothers, fathers,
siblings and other loved ones touched by the Sandy Hook massacre shared
their raw feelings with senator after senator. They exhorted lawmakers
to expand the federal background check system — a measure that would not
have stopped the Sandy Hook assailant, a mentally disturbed 20-year-old
who stole guns his mother had legally purchased, but that experts said
could save lives and, more to the point, was so overwhelmingly popular
among the public that it could win enough votes to pass.
The
family members exposed their anguish to the harsh glare of the
political spotlight, handing out postcards with smiling pictures of the
young victims — one wearing a Superman T-shirt, another holding a pink
umbrella — alongside admonitions such as “Honor Her Life.” The card for
Ben Wheeler, featuring his first-grade school portrait, asked, “What is
worth doing?”
If there was ever a moment when major gun laws stood a chance of passing, this was it.
The
nation had been seized with horror by the Dec. 14, 2012, massacre in
Newtown, Conn., that killed 20 children and six adults — the deadliest
shooting ever at a K-12 school and, for many Americans, a gruesome
introduction to the carnage that a gunman with an AR-15 can inflict.
President Barack Obama, who had just been reelected, called for dramatic
new gun restrictions. Even the National Rifle Association, which had
held the line on gun policy for nearly 20 years, was engaged with
lawmakers about a possible legislative response.
The question facing members of Congress that spring was whether they would act to try
to prevent future Sandy Hooks — or if the shattered windows,
blood-soaked classrooms and decimated bodies of Newtown foretold the
inevitable future of a nation in which the tools of mass death would remain readily available.
They would do nothing.
Days
after her meeting with Wheeler, Heitkamp joined three other red-state
Democrats and 41 Republicans to successfully block the background check
bill the Sandy Hook families had begged her to support. A more sweeping
proposal that would have banned many semiautomatic weapons failed that
day by an even wider margin, with opposition from 16 members of the
Democratic caucus. A ban on high-capacity magazines like the one used by
the Sandy Hook shooter also fell short.
Now,
as mass shootings have become more frequent in the decade since Sandy
Hook, four current senators and three former senators have taken the
remarkable step of recanting some or all of their 2013 positions. In
emotional interviews with The Washington Post in recent weeks, some
expressed deep regret for not pushing at the time for measures to
restrict made-for-combat weapons or taking other steps to slow the
violence that would only grow more common in the years to come.
“Not
that I agree with the exact language of these bills, but it was my
obligation looking backwards to provide leadership, even though I was
there a hot minute, to make those bills better,” Heitkamp, who was sworn
into office a few weeks after the Sandy Hook massacre, said in one of
two recent interviews. “And I didn’t do that. My activity was passive,
not active, in searching for a solution, and that I regret.”
Heitkamp
said she did not recall the meeting with Wheeler but was
“extraordinarily sorry” for leaving families with the sense that she
didn’t care about the children who were killed or the experiences of their grieving parents.
“If any person was left with the impression that I had anything other than the most supreme sympathy and just hurt, that is a failure on my part, and I couldn’t apologize more,” she said.
The
six others who described to The Post their changed perspectives on gun
policy were Sens. Michael F. Bennet (D-Colo.), Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.),
Angus King (I-Maine) and Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), as well as former
senators Mark Begich (D-Alaska) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.).
It is rare for politicians to shift their views on
policy issues as culturally divisive as gun rights. But the expressions
of remorse underscore how the failure to change laws in response to
Sandy Hook continues to haunt many who held power at the time —
prompting some of them to openly wonder if they allowed short-term
political considerations to cloud their judgment on votes that
might have saved lives. Obama, addressing Sandy Hook families last year
at an event commemorating the 10th anniversary of the shooting, called
Congress’s inaction that spring despite his personal lobbying “perhaps
the most bitter disappointment of my time in office, the closest I came
to being cynical.”
Udall,
who voted against the assault weapons ban that spring, said if he was
“in a time machine and going back” he would bring a grim message to his
younger self: “This is going to get worse and worse. More and more
people are going to be deeply affected by this.” If he could do it
again, Udall said, he would vote for the ban and “take the political
heat.”
Looking
back, Heitkamp said, only later in her term did she begin to assert
herself more aggressively on issues where she felt the long-term
consequences of a vote outweighed the difficulty of going against the
views of most North Dakotans — a “process of becoming more certain” in
her role as a senator, she said.
“You
are going to take votes that will upset, probably in those cases, the
majority of your constituency,” she said. “But these are votes that have
a permanency beyond your service.”
The
senators’ changing views also reflect how the Democratic Party has
moved in recent years toward supporting more aggressive gun control.
Many Democrats had long refused to consider strict gun limits, blaming their party’s steep losses in the 1994 midterm elections
on the enactment that year of an assault weapons ban. The ban’s
expiration in 2004 preceded a new era of soaring semiautomatic weapons
production, escalating after Sandy Hook, that has made the AR-15 the
country’s best-selling rifle. Today, a well-financed advocacy network —
sparked by the 2013 defeat in the Senate and supercharged by the
mobilization of young people after the 2018 school shooting in Parkland,
Fla. — has heightened pressure on Democrats to unify around stronger
gun-control policies.
The
momentum culminated in the passage last year, after the elementary
school massacre in Uvalde, Tex., of the first significant defeat to the
NRA in nearly three decades — a bipartisan measure adding modest
firearms restrictions while spending billions on mental health services
and school safety.
Still, the changes
sought in the trio of measures that failed to pass in 2013 remain
largely unrealized. And advocates acknowledge that enacting anything
that far-reaching today would require Democrats to control the White
House and Congress, with majorities large enough to overcome a Senate
filibuster or eliminate that procedural obstacle altogether.
Comparing two key Senate votes on banning assault weapons
November 17, 1993
Passed
A
measure to ban certain semiautomatic weapons passed the Senate by a
simple majority, before the filibuster became a standard procedure, and
went on to be enacted as part of a sweeping 1994 crime bill signed by
President Bill Clinton.
Failed
A
measure to restore the previous ban on many semiautomatic weapons,
which had expired in 2004, fell short of the 60 votes needed to overcome
a filibuster.
60 votes
needed to pass
Gun
rights advocates say the popularity of the AR-15 and other
semiautomatic weapons shows the political danger for lawmakers in any
attempt to restrict firearms.
“Politicians
who aggressively push gun control run the risk of going against voter
sentiment and risk their reelection by challenging these deeply held
American values,” Randy Kozuch, executive director of the NRA’s
Institute for Legislative Action, said in a statement to The Post.
Some of the senators who spoke to The Post acknowledged they had been influenced by
the political power of the NRA and its allies and now feel they had
been wrong to elevate the convenience of law-abiding gun owners over the
opportunity to limit gun violence.
Some
said that they changed their minds after emotional conversations with
victims’ families or their own children and that they are hoping for a
second chance to finally do right by Newtown.
Heinrich,
a lifelong gun owner and hunter, said that after the Parkland massacre,
his son, Carter, then in high school, joined other young people in
demanding new gun laws at the March for Our Lives on the National Mall.
“When your kid tells you you’re wrong with that much conviction, you need to stop and think about it,” Heinrich said.
He voted against the
2013 assault weapons ban proposal. The bill was not perfect, Heinrich
said, “but when you weigh that against what we’ve experienced in the
intervening years, if that were on the floor would I vote for it? Yeah.”
He added: “I didn’t feel at the time like this was my issue. And I
think after you experienced a decade of mass shootings, it’s everyone’s
issue.”
Heinrich and two other senators who voted against the assault weapons ban 10 years ago — Bennet and King — recently
introduced legislation that does not go as far in eliminating dangerous
firearms but instead would limit ammunition magazines and restrict
other lethal features from certain semiautomatic weapons. They sponsored
the bill with Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), whose wife, then-Rep.
Gabrielle Giffords, was injured in a 2011 mass shooting in Tucson.
Back
in 2013, many senators felt pressure when their offices received phone
calls from NRA members in numbers that dwarfed the calls from supporters
of gun restrictions, a sign of the pro-gun group’s entrenched
organization. Some, like Udall, were heading into reelection a year
later, facing the potential that backing strict gun laws could spark a
voter revolt.
Heitkamp said she could tell where most of the voters in her state stood. “The NRA in some ways reflects the constituency,” she said.
But
Wheeler, knowing that Heitkamp would not face voters for another five
years, said she left the senator’s office feeling “angry, sad and
confused as to why she would not help us.”
“I
don’t know what was worse,” Wheeler added, “the senators who wept for
Ben and then voted no, or the senators like [Heitkamp] who never even
listened in the first place.”
‘Our only shot’
The
first conversations in Newtown about mobilizing to demand new gun laws
took place almost immediately after the Friday morning massacre. By
Sunday, several dozen neighbors and local leaders, still in shock,
filled a community room at the public library.
“We
went around the room and asked people, what do we want to push for,
what do we need to do?” recalled Po Murray, who had been involved in
local politics for years and lived in the same neighborhood as the
gunman. “I vividly recall that the majority wanted to ban assault
weapons.”
Some thought a federal ban could happen. Even Sen. Joe Manchin III, a pro-gun Democrat with an A rating from the NRA, had said on national TV three days after the shooting that he was open to it.
In the coming weeks, though, the efforts in Newtown splintered.
Murray
and other activists who were successfully pushing the Connecticut
legislature to toughen its gun laws argued that the community should
push Congress for a ban, later forming a new gun-control group called
the Newtown Action Alliance. Others pressed for a more tempered approach
that might appeal to the political middle — eventually creating Sandy
Hook Promise, the advocacy group that would help lead the charge for the
upcoming fight in Congress.
Several
of the families who had lost loved ones, still grieving and
traumatized, soon threw themselves into the discussions, flying to
Washington for meetings with the president and vice president as well as
leading lawmakers and others involved in the gun debate. For some, it
was their first experience in politics — and suddenly they were the
unwitting spokespeople for an issue they knew little about.
“I
didn’t even know what the NRA was until this happened,” Nicole Hockley,
whose 6-year-old son, Dylan, was killed in the shooting, recalled in a
recent interview.
The
families met with a Washington-based think tank, Third Way, as they
assessed what types of federal legislation they should pursue. Matt
Bennett, an executive vice president for the group, told the families
that the “most obvious thing to do” in response to the tragedy was to
ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. But he warned them that
such measures had no hope in the Republican-led House or the
Democratic-led Senate, where a bipartisan majority remained skeptical of
gun restrictions.
Bennett
offered a more realistic goal: persuading lawmakers to close loopholes
in the federal background check system, which is supposed to prevent
criminals and those with documented mental health issues from buying
guns. Polls showed broad support for the proposal that these families
could amplify.
“With the moral authority that you now have,” he recalled telling them, “it is conceivable that we can do that.”
Senators
and advocates said later it had become immediately clear that banning
anything would be a political nonstarter. Even restricting the types of
high-capacity magazines that had allowed the Sandy Hook gunman to fire
154 rounds in less than five minutes failed before it began when Sen.
Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who as a House member had represented Newtown
and had gotten to know many of the families, couldn’t persuade a
Republican to co-sponsor the measure.
“I
remember being a little bit more hopeful about the high-capacity
magazine ban, but, again, that hope got dashed pretty quickly,” Murphy
recalled.
The setback made an impression on the Sandy Hook families.
“How
hard is it to convince someone, like maybe don’t give somebody the
opportunity to have 30 rounds in a magazine?” asked David Wheeler,
Francine’s husband and father of Ben. “When that went down, we were
shocked. That’s when I think we all got a real flavor for how difficult
this was going to be.”
Ultimately,
the Sandy Hook Promise group made the decision to focus its efforts on
expanding background checks to internet and gun-show sales, not on
assault weapons or magazine bans that seemed destined to fail.
Mark
Barden, whose 7-year-old son, Daniel, was killed in the shooting, said
he and his wife felt they owed it to Daniel and his two older siblings
to make any difference while they could — and background checks had a
chance.
“We
found ourselves in a moment in time when people would actually listen
to us,” said Barden, who had worked until the shooting as a professional
guitarist and now helps run Sandy Hook Promise with Hockley. “We felt
that was our only shot.”
The families found an unlikely ally in Manchin, who had easily won election in conservative West Virginia in 2010 after running an ad in which he fired a bullet from a rifle into the text of an Obama-backed bill to limit carbon emissions. Manchin,
who is not seeking reelection next year and is weighing an independent
presidential bid, was so moved by the slaughter of children about the
same age as his grandchildren that he hung photos of the Sandy Hook
victims in the hallway to his private office and made himself a central
figure in the debate. He dialed back support for an assault weapons ban,
worked GOP friends and contacts at the NRA, and rallied votes for the
background checks bill.
“Let’s just walk before we go into sprinting and running,” he recalled saying.
By early April, however, even the background checks proposal was becoming a steep political climb.
The
NRA vowed to oppose the legislation. And despite Sen. Patrick J. Toomey
(R-Pa.) teaming up with Manchin as a co-sponsor, several Republican
senators said they would block the measure by filibuster, meaning that
supporters would need 60 votes for passage.
Obama,
who had first met the families when he visited Newtown days after the
tragedy, returned to Connecticut — telling a raucous crowd at a Hartford
basketball arena that some senators were planning “political stunts” to
prevent gun legislation from coming to the floor. That night, the White
House said, the president flew 11 Sandy Hook family members to
Washington on Air Force One.
The lobbying push would begin the next day.
9 days, 37 senators
The
Sandy Hook families arrived on Capitol Hill on the morning of April 9,
2013, their schedule packed with media appearances and private meetings
with senators. Their goal: to make emotional connections with
potentially persuadable Republicans and pro-gun Democrats.
“We weren’t interested in shaming senators for their position,” Barden said. “We thought this was such a modest request.”
Multiple
Republicans told the families upfront that they had no intention of
voting for the background checks bill, though family members recalled
that those meetings were often cordial.
“I
have an obligation to listen,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who
vividly recalls the conversation and has stayed in touch with Barden
over the years. “But I weigh that with where I come from and in the
views of the people that I represent.”
Some
Democrats and Sandy Hook families had hoped that they might find a
Republican ally in Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, who weeks before their
meeting had announced his support for same-sex marriage, noting that his son is gay.
However,
Portman had separately told at least one colleague during negotiations
over the bill that he would not back gun restrictions because it was
difficult to represent a conservative state and take more than one
controversial liberal position, according to two Democrats who heard the
comments and described them on the condition of anonymity because they
were made in a private conversation.
In
the meeting with the families, Portman told the group that he would not
support the background checks measure even though he believed it could
save lives.
Hockley
said that she responded with a piercing personal question: “So, you can
vote to protect your son, but you can’t vote to protect mine?”
Portman, who retired from the Senate this year, declined to comment for this story.
There were also frustrating conversations with some Democrats, family members said.
When
the families arrived for their meeting with Begich, the Alaska senator
who was up for reelection in 2014, they were told by aides to sit at a
conference table in an outer lobby area rather than being invited to a private space, according to Thomas and Bergthold, the consultants escorting the families.
The staff refused to close the door to the noisy hallway, they said.
“Can
we go back to your office?” Thomas recalled asking Begich when the
senator emerged. Begich said no. The conversation, however emotional,
would happen in the lobby, in full public earshot and view.
Begich,
in a recent interview, said he did not intend to be disrespectful,
noting that his lower-level offices did not have much meeting space. “If
they took it that way, then I apologize,” he said. “But I took what
they told me very seriously.” He said the pictures of the children that
the parents had handed him remained beside his computer until he left
the Senate after losing his reelection bid the following year.
The weekend before the votes would occur, Obama took the unusual step of turning his weekly presidential video address
over to the Wheelers. Francine, fighting back tears, described how Ben
had “experienced life at full tilt,” sang with perfect pitch and had
just played at his third piano recital. She pleaded with viewers to
contact their senators: “Please help us do something before our tragedy
becomes your tragedy.”
By
the time the final votes would be cast on the afternoon of April 17,
the families had met with 37 senators in nine days, according to Sandy
Hook Promise’s records.
As
the Sandy Hook group sat in the public gallery overlooking the Senate
floor, joined by survivors and families of victims from other mass
shootings, many held out hope that the lobbying campaign had worked. If
the background checks bill survived, they knew the GOP-led House loomed
as the next step, but maybe a bipartisan win in the Senate would give
them the boost they’d need.
Heitkamp’s
office had been swamped with calls from constituents urging her to
oppose the measure, but she did not make up her mind until hours before
voting, she recently told The Post. Though she believed that the
Manchin-Toomey measure would not stop mass killings like Sandy Hook or
effectively prevent other forms of gun violence, she saw the bill as a
way for senators to show they cared.
Heitkamp
voted no, as did three other Democrats from conservative states —
Begich, Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Max Baucus of Montana.
“This
was a tough vote in a tough state on a piece of legislation that I
didn’t think was particularly useful to solve the problem,” Heitkamp
said in a recent interview.
In
the end, just three Republicans other than Toomey — Sens. Susan Collins
of Maine, Mark Kirk of Illinois and John McCain of Arizona — voted for
the legislation.
Moments before the gavel fell, 55 senators had voted yes — a majority, but five short of choking off the filibuster.
How the background checks bill won a majority but lost anyway
Yes
Failed
A
measure to expand the federal background check system designed to
prevent people with criminal histories or mental health issues from
purchasing guns, fell short of a filibuster-proof majority.
Note:
The final tally in favor was 54, after Senate Majority Leader Harry M.
Reid changed his vote to no in a procedural maneuver that would allow
for him to call for another vote, though he never did.
60 votes
needed to pass
A
decade after the failure, Manchin still laments that neither he nor
Democratic leaders tried to force several more votes to pressure
senators. “Just one and done,” Manchin said. “One and done on that was
wrong.”
The families, and some senators, wept.
Sen.
Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who had hours earlier admonished his fellow
Democrats over lunch to not be “bystanders” in the face of rising gun
violence, later said that day remains one of the worst of his tenure —
now tied with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
“I
thought the magnitude of the tragedy and the effectiveness of these
families and the popularity of what was on the table, you know, I just
thought all of those things, we’re going to get there,” Kaine said. “And
I just remember feeling that we let them down. We let them all down,
and they were right there to watch it.”
Hockley,
a former marketing executive who had been planning to open a health and
fitness shop until the shooting turned her into a full-time advocate,
described the vote as another gut punch.
“This
was one thing I could do and I couldn’t even do this,” she said. “ ...
For something so simple not to be able to pass. I genuinely felt like,
you know, I failed to protect Dylan from getting killed, and then I
failed to do something for his legacy or protect my surviving son’s
future.”
The
families left the gallery and rode with Vice President Joe Biden, who
had presided over the vote in his capacity as president of the Senate,
in his motorcade back to the White House.
Obama
was preparing to address the nation from the Rose Garden, where he
would accuse senators from both parties of caving to pressure from the
gun lobby.
Barden,
who would introduce the president, said that before they stepped
outside from the Oval Office, Obama grabbed him by the shoulders.
“He
was pissed. I mean, he was visibly, personally mad, which you don’t
see,” Barden said. Then, he recalled, as they prepared to step outside,
Obama added, “Let’s go rip the bark off of it.”
Regrets and revised positions
With
all the intensity surrounding the demise of the background checks bill,
the measures that many advocates believed would be the most effective
way to prevent future Sandy Hooks had become mere afterthoughts.
A ban on high-capacity magazines was defeated 46-54. The assault weapons ban failed 40-60.
One
of the Democrats to vote against the assault weapons ban was Bennet, of
Colorado. Two weeks earlier, he had attended an Obama speech in Denver
to rally support for the background checks bill. There he met Sandy
Phillips, whose daughter, 24-year-old Jessica Redfield Ghawi, was killed
by an AR-15-wielding gunman during the movie theater massacre in
Aurora, Colo., just five months before Sandy Hook.
Phillips
sat in the Senate gallery on April 17 and witnessed the defeat, but
background checks were never her primary goal. Even as some major
gun-control groups continued to push for more incremental changes,
Phillips began what would be a years-long quest to persuade Bennet to
support an assault weapons ban, the law she felt would do the most good.
Over coffees, lunches, meetings in Washington and Colorado, after
subsequent mass shootings, she made her case. “This is the right side of
history to deal with,” Phillips recalled telling Bennet, “and this is
the moral right.”
For
nearly a decade, Bennet didn’t budge. Then came the 2022 shooting at a
July Fourth parade in Highland Park, Ill. Phillips visited Bennet in his
Washington office, leaned in, touched his forearm and asked him to look
into her eyes.
“It’s time,” she recalled saying. Both of them teared up.
Bennet said later that Phillips did not need to spell out the specific request. “I knew what she meant, and she was right,” he said.
It
took a few months — after Bennet had won reelection by nearly 15
percentage points, his largest margin ever, and another mass shooting in
his state, in which a gunman used an AR-15 to kill five in a Colorado
Springs nightclub — before he publicly announced his support for the
assault weapons ban.
Other current and former senators expressed remorse for their votes and, in some cases, their conduct during the 2013 debate.
Heitkamp, now
the director of the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, told
The Post that she wishes she had inserted herself into the debate more
aggressively despite having just arrived in Washington.
“I
can look back and say I could have done much better at the time, and I
do feel that I could have had a more honest discussion,” she said, adding
later: “The Sandy Hook parents still deserve a response. And to the
extent that I was part of a failure in that response, it’s a regret.”
Heitkamp
said that the “time has come to examine the kind of weapons that we
allow people in the general public to own. … As a society we cannot seem
to keep these weapons out of the hands of people who will do incredible
damage.”
Begich,
too, wonders today if his focus back in 2013 on hyperlocal concerns —
such as the fear that instant background checks wouldn’t work in remote
Alaska villages or that some on the North Slope used AR-15s to protect
themselves against polar bears — prevented him from weighing the
potential national benefits of additional gun restrictions.
“In retrospect, I look back and say sometimes you’ve got to sacrifice those elements for the greater good,” he said.
Udall,
retired from politics, lives near Boulder’s King Soopers grocery store
where, in March 2021, a gunman used an AR-style pistol to kill 10
people. Every time he goes shopping there he thinks about the shooting.
He said the growing toll of mass killings has eaten away at what he
calls the “emotional security in a civilized society.”
“You got to think it’s contributing in some ways to just the sense in America that things aren’t quite right,” Udall said.
Udall,
who voted for the background checks bill and the ban on high-capacity
magazines and is now on the board of Giffords’s anti-gun-violence group,
lamented having a “misguided belief” during much of his term that he
could develop a fruitful working relationship with the NRA. He said he
appeared once at a news conference with the group’s leaders — only to
learn later that they would oppose his reelection anyway.
“All the time they were working with me, they were organizing to take me out in 2014,” he said.
Kozuch, of
the NRA, said that Udall was a “gun-control advocate,” saying that he
can “try to revise history but his anti-gun voting record speaks for
itself.”
Several
of the current Democratic senators who have come to support the assault
weapons ban represent states that have tilted more liberal since 2013,
making their changed positions an act of political expedience as well as
an expression of regret.
Warner,
who voted against the ban, had come up in politics courting traditional
Democrats in Virginia’s rural outposts and small towns, sponsoring a
NASCAR entrant during his 2001 governor’s race. He likes to consider
himself a “radical centrist,” but by 2018, the political map had
changed. The path to victory in Virginia now ran through the Washington
suburbs, where gun control is popular.
Soon after Sandy Hook, Warner’s three daughters began what
would become a nearly six-year effort to persuade their father to
switch his position and support an assault weapons ban. With each
successive mass shooting, they became more direct with their pleas.
“That
kid went to school the same way I did,” Eliza Warner, now 29, recalled
telling her father after one of the massacres. The senator would defend
his position as “the art of the possible,” but still his daughters
pushed him. At one point, Eliza asked, “How can we think having clear
backpacks is the solution?” Another daughter, Warner said, texted him
after a mass shooting to say simply, “wtf.”
Almost eight months after the 2018 Parkland shooting, Warner came around to their point of view. He wrote an op-ed declaring he had changed his mind, regretted that vote and now supported banning assault weapons.
Reflecting
during a recent interview, Warner recalled that the Sandy Hook families
had never pressed him to support the ban. Asked what he would have done
if they had, the senator paused.
“I don’t know how I would have turned them down,” he said. “I don’t know how I could have looked them in the eye.”
In their own words
Four
current senators and three former senators explain why their views on
semiautomatic weapons have changed since 2013, when each of them voted
against an assault weapons ban.
Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.)
“I
don’t remember when I reached the point in which I, like, threw out the
NRA card and didn’t renew my membership. But my point being, I didn’t
feel at the time like this was my issue [in 2013]. And I think, after
you experienced a decade of mass shootings, it’s everyone’s issue. And
so that’s the kind of journey that I’ve been on.”
“I
don’t remember when I reached the point in which I, like, threw out the
NRA card and didn’t renew my membership. But my point being, I didn’t
feel at the time like this was my issue [in 2013]. And I think, after
you experienced a decade of mass shootings, it’s everyone’s issue. And
so that’s the kind of journey that I’ve been on.”
Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.)
“I’ve
got three daughters. ... A couple of them separately came to me at one
point and — I’m not sure they used ‘what the f---,’ but it was the
equivalent. ‘Dad what are you doing?’ They believe in me but this is
just indefensible, and these are weapons of war.”
Former senator Mark Begich (D-Alaska)
“If
I look back and think about those moments — and it was a pretty
volatile time, to say the least — I look back now and think about it
today. Would I have done something different today? Yeah, I would
probably have voted differently. I probably would have pushed the
envelope a little bit harder because there was more backroom politics
going on versus what should have been going on.”
Sen. Angus King (I-Maine)
“I
didn’t like the idea of banning a weapon because of what it looked
like. To me, that was too easily maneuvered, manipulated by the
manufacturers. They could just change the design slightly. And in fact,
that happened. I’ve been focused on how do we get at functionality as a
definition to deal with the lethality of these weapons. … I suppose
[October’s Maine mass shooting] solidified my view that this is
something we have to do.”
Former senator Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.)
“The
time has come to examine the kind of weapons that we allow people in
the general public to own. ... As a society, we cannot seem to keep
these weapons out of the hands of people who will do incredible damage. …
I think it’s time to limit what we can sell to the average American
public and make that argument more strongly.”
“The
time has come to examine the kind of weapons that we allow people in
the general public to own. ... As a society, we cannot seem to keep
these weapons out of the hands of people who will do incredible damage. …
I think it’s time to limit what we can sell to the average American
public and make that argument more strongly.”
Former senator Mark Udall (D-Colo.)
“I’d
rather, in my record, have a vote to take some significant steps, even
with the risks involved politically and policy wise, to reduce the
access to weapons, these assault weapons. Looking back, I mean, given
what’s happened in another 10 years … the emotional security in a
civilized society. And you got to think it’s contributing in some ways
to just the sense in America that things aren’t quite right.”
Sen. Michael F. Bennet (D-Colo.)
“It’s
my daughters, too. I always talk about the fact that Columbine happened
a year before Caroline Bennet was born. She’s my oldest daughter. They
all grew up in the shadow of gun violence in America since Columbine and
the knowledge that nobody here was doing anything about it.”
About this story
Reporting by Peter Wallsten and Paul Kane. Portraits by Matt McClain and Chet Strange.
Design
and development by Aadit Tambe. Design editing by Madison Walls. Photo
editing by Natalia Jimenez. Graphics editing by Chiqui Esteban.
Editing
by Philip Rucker and Wendy Galietta. Additional editing by Kim Chapman
and Jordan Melendrez. Additional support from Sarah Murray, Ashleigh
Wilson, Kyley Schultz and Brandon Carter.
