Senate rejects more gun-sale checks

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

A polarized Senate voted Thursday against expanding background checks for more gun purchases, rejecting the proposal a day after the latest U.S. mass shooting left 14 people dead in California.

Thursday’s mostly party-line 50-48 vote, which followed the Senate’s defeat of other firearms curbs, underscored that political gridlock over the issue remains formidable in Washington, even amid a rash of highly publicized U.S. shootings and last month’s terror attack in Paris.

The background-check measure, co-authored by Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Patrick Toomey, R-Pa., was the same proposal the Senate rejected in early 2013, just months after 20 children and six educators were shot to death at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.

In that roll call two years ago in a Democratic-controlled Senate, the effort fell five votes short of the 60 needed to overcome opponents’ tactics aimed at derailing it. The plan was strongly opposed by the National Rifle Association, which emailed its members Thursday urging them to contact senators and “tell them to vote against any gun-control amendments.”

Manchin said his amendment “makes all the sense in the world.”

Thursday’s first replay of the issue since that 2013 vote showed an erosion of support by seven votes since then and came in what is now a Republican-run Senate.