Even the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history won’t be enough to break the grip of the gun lobby and partisanship to produce meaningful changes in gun laws, Sen. Al Franken predicts.
“We have a Congress where the Republicans are in the majority in the House and the majority in the Senate. So this week we’ve been doing gun stuff, right? And it’s pretty much skins and shirts,” Franken told David Axelrod on “The Axe Files,” a podcast produced by CNN and the University of Chicago Institute of Politics.
The Minnesota Democrat said he supports measures such as universal background checks and banning certain assault weapons, like those used in both the San Bernardino and Orlando shootings. Such a ban might have limited the carnage, he said.
Such gun control measures were rejected on a mostly party-line vote in the Senate this week.
Franken, who represents a state with many hunters and sportsmen, acknowledged that his position in favor of new gun strictures is irksome to some constituents. However, Franken said he believes their opposition is rooted in a misreading of the proposals he supports.
“There are some people who buy the ‘you guys want to take our guns away,’ when there’s nothing that could be further from the truth,” Franken said. “We don’t want to take people’s guns away. We want to take guns away from people who shouldn’t have them.”
Franken said he is reserving judgment on a compromise proposal by Republican Sen. Susan Collins, narrower in scope than Democratic proposals offered earlier in the week, which would prevent people on no-fly lists from obtaining guns.
He said such a law, without a companion effort to plug loopholes that would allow suspected terrorists to buy guns without a background check through other means, could prove ineffective.
“All you’re doing is you’re inconveniencing the terrorist because he can just go online and get it anyway or he can go to a gun show and get it anyway,” Franken said. “Unless we plug that, this is sort of meaningless. At least it tells the FBI that this person we suspect is trying to get a gun, or maybe it tells the terrorist that they’re on the list.”
To listen to the whole conversation, which touched on Franken’s career in comedy, his work on mental health issues, click on podcast.cnn.com. For new episodes every week, subscribe to “The Axe Files” on iTunes at iTunes.com/theaxefiles.