Forget Congress—The Gun Business Faces a Judge

On the seventh day, Congress rested. A week after returning to Washington following the Orlando massacre, with funerals still underway from the lone-gunman case with the highest death toll in American history, the Senate chose to do nothing that might prevent something like it from happening again. Senators rejected four separate gun-safety bills that would have expanded background checks and made it harder for terrorism suspects to buy guns. The failure of the votes on Monday, and the failure of the body itself to perform more than a pantomime of governing, surprised nobody: not the senators or their staffs, not the gun-rights activists or the gun-control activists, not the parents of gunfire victims or the survivors of previous massacres, who have, in recent years, taken to wandering the halls of the Capitol in hopes of capturing the conscience of a public servant. The only thing that ever changes is the number of the grieving, because there is always a new massacre. Erica Lafferty Smegielski, whose mother was the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary School, where a gunman killed twenty children and six adults, in 2012, told the Times that “every time we come together for something like this, there is someone new we are introduced to for the first time.” In despair, Florida’s Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat, said after the vote, “What am I going to tell forty-nine grieving families? I am going to tell them the N.R.A. won again.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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