Though Kamala Harris regularly touts her support for an "assault weapons" ban on the campaign trail, the candidate has refused to discuss the details of her demands. Her campaign staff says she no longer supports a mandatory "buyback" of so-called assault weapons, but has offered no explanation about why she's supposedly changed her mind. Harris hasn't even defined the term "assault weapon", though she's repeatedly said they don't belong on the streets of a civil society.
While Harris isn't willing to elaborate on her gun ban plans, there's a bill ready for action in the Senate if she's elected and Democrats keep their slim majority three weeks from now. Senators Angus King of Maine and New Mexico's Martin Heinrich introduced the GOSAFE Act earlier this year, which would prohibit the manufacture and sale of all gas-operated semi-automatic long guns and ammunition magazines with a capacity greater than ten rounds. Though the bill has not had a hearing since its introduction, King is holding out hope that there'll be a path forward for his gun ban bill in the months ahead.
Rather than ban specific types of assault weapons as others have proposed, King’s bill would limit the bullet capacity of magazines to 10 rounds for rifles and shotguns, and 15 rounds for handguns. The bill would ban detachable magazines that make it easy to rapidly reload weapons. The magazines would instead be a fixed, internal component of the gun, and weapons would have to be reloaded manually.
The bill was part of King’s response to the Lewiston mass shooting, where 18 people were killed at two locations on Oct. 25, 2023. The shooter, Robert Card, had high-capacity magazines on his AR-10 rifle.
Margaret Groban, a board member of the Maine Gun Safety Coalition, which has long advocated for gun reforms, said she’s not surprised King’s bill didn’t go anywhere, despite it being a “creative” solution to limit the harm that can be done by a mass shooter with a military-style rifle. Alternative efforts to ban certain types of rifles have failed.
“I’m not surprised that nothing happened with it,” Groban said. “It just shows how partisan this is, and how so many people have a knee-jerk reaction to a commonsense bill.”
It's not partisan politics that have kept the GOSAFE Act from getting a hearing in the Senate Finance Committee, which is chaired by Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon. Wyden was not only a cosponsor of the late Dianne Feinstein's "assault weapons ban". He's a cosponsor of the GOSAFE Act as well.
So why hasn't Wyden brought the legislation up for a hearing? Even if there aren't 60 votes in the Senate to pass the gun ban bill, it could pass out of committee on a party-line vote, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer could bring the bill to the Senate floor for a full vote. If Schumer believed that holding a vote on the GOSAFE Act would benefit Democrats in this year's election, I'm sure he would have made sure that the bill had a pathway to a vote by the full Senate.
The simplest explanation for the GOSAFE Act's failure to launch is that Democratic leadership views the bill as a liability in an election year. Rather than defining an "assault weapon" through cosmetic features or by make and model, King and Heinrich's legislation simply treats all semi-automatic long guns with a caliber greater than .22LR as "assault weapons". While that innovation has been praised by many gun control advocates, Democrats have been reluctant to attach their names to the legislation. In fact, of the 17 Senate co-sponsors, only a handful are up for re-election this year.
Ronald Schmidt, a political science professor at the University of Southern Maine, said by focusing on the technical aspects of gun manufacturing, King and Heinrich attempted to defuse political opposition. But he said it’s a testament to how difficult gun legislation is to pass that the GOSAFE Act failed to gain traction.
“Sen. King should get kudos for an inventive attempt. He went to great lengths to try to get around the usual opposition to these types of bills,” Schmidt said. “It’s really depressing that it went nowhere.”
It's only depressing if you think the Second Amendment is meaningless and offers no protection whatsoever to commonly owned rifles and shotguns. What is truly sad, however, is the fact that the GOSAFE Act is likely to become much more popular among Democrats after the elections are over. Republicans stand a very good chance of taking back the Senate next month, but if Democrats cling to power in the upper chamber a semi-auto ban is likely to emerge as a top priority, especially if they have Kamala Harris in the White House ready and willing to sign it into law.
