


Senator seeks bipartisan support for gun deal

Collins, a Maine Republican, and her supporters are selling their measure, which would bar roughly 2,700 Americans suspected of being terrorists from buying a gun, as the only way to break the political logjam surrounding the emotionally charged issue of gun control in the wake of mass shootings, such as the one in Orlando over a week ago.
“What you see here is an effort not to have a vote that will simply allow each party to use a cudgel to beat the other party with, but rather to have something that would actually pass,” said Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., a member of the eight-person group that met with Collins over the last week to hash out the proposal.
“It's very comfortable for us to sit in our respective corners and vote for something that we know isn't going to change things,” said Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., another member of Collins' group. “It's time to start putting progress in front of politics.”
Collins' proposal denies the right to purchase guns to anyone on two subsets of the FBI's Terrorist Screening Database: The “no fly list,” which prohibits suspected terrorists from boarding planes heading to or from the United States or crossing U.S. airspace, and the “Selectee List,” which requires extra screening procedures. There are approximately 109,000 people on those lists, including about 2,700 Americans, by the senators' count.
“Essentially we believe that if you are too dangerous to fly on an airplane, you're too dangerous to buy a gun,” Collins said Tuesday.
But Democrats have said Republicans need to lure about 20 votes in order to make passing Collins' proposal doable — and that is a bar that no one is yet sure they can clear.
“I think we're getting there, I do,” Flake said.
Senate Democratic Conference Vice Chairman Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Tuesday that Collins' proposal is “a step in the right direction” but that it also has “some serious problems.”
He argued that by focusing on the two smaller lists, hundreds of thousands of other suspected terrorists could slip through the cracks.
He also said that the expedited appeals process for anyone believing they were mistakenly denied a gun is too fast.
On Monday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who authored one of four bills that failed in the Senate this week, said that Collins' proposal is “not enough to close the loophole that creates this terror gap.”
Democrats are predicting that they will “do more than our share on the Democratic side of the aisle,” in Heinrich's words, to help pass the proposal. But he hinted not all Democrats would be on board.
“There is a ‘let the perfect be the enemy of the good' that exists on both sides of the aisle,” Heinrich said.
Passing gun control legislation will be an uphill battle in the Senate, and it would face even stauncher resistance in the GOP-controlled House. Four gun control proposals were rejected by the Senate on Monday — two to expand background checks on gun sales and two to restrict suspected terrorists from buying guns.
Collins' proposal includes a five-year “lookback provision” to alert the FBI when someone who used to be on one of those lists purchases a firearm. Omar Mateen, the Orlando, Fla., shooter was on a watch list before being removed by investigators.
In order to address concerns over due process for those mistakenly placed on a watch list, the proposal would allow U.S. citizens and green-card holders to file a legal appeal if they feel they were wrongly denied a firearm.
The burden would then be on the government to prove its case, and cover the person's legal fees if he or she were found to be erroneously placed on a list of suspected terrorists.