WASHINGTON - The Senate defeated a plan to expand background checks for firearm purchasers, imperiling President Barack Obama’s bid for new gun-control measures four months after 20 schoolchildren were shot to death in Newtown, Conn.
Senators voted 54-46, with 60 needed to adopt the measure, as a handful of Democrats joined most Republicans in opposition. The vote was the most significant on gun control in 20 years and countered high public support of mandatory background checks.
Both of Arkansas’ senators voted against the proposal.
“The fight has just begun; it’s not going away,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., told reporters after the vote.
Obama spoke at the White House after the Senate vote, standing with victims of gun violence, including former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, and some of their relatives. Giffords, a Democrat from Arizona, was shot in the head in Tucson, Ariz., in 2011.
Obama called Wednesday “a pretty shameful day for Washington” and called the Senate vote a “distortion” of Senate rules because a minority of lawmakers was able to block the background-check proposal.
“The gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill,” he said. ”They claimed that it would create some sort of big-government registry.”
The president said the administration would do “everything it can” without Congress to protect Americans.
And he criticized opponents of gun-control legislation who had said lobbying by the family members of Newtown victims was inappropriate.
“Are they serious?” he said. “Do we really think that thousands of families whose lives have been shattered by gun violence do not have a right to weigh in?”
The defeated amendment was offered last week by Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a Democrat, and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, a Republican, in an effort to craft a proposal that could win bipartisan support.
The Senate also rejected Obama-backed proposals to ban assault weapons and limit the size of ammunition magazines. All required 60 votes.
The debate over gun control was reignited by the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown. Adam Lanza used a Bushmaster AR-15 semiautomatic rifle to kill 20 children and six school employees. Obama proposed a gun-safety agenda weeks later, including a ban on assault weapons and size limits on ammunition magazines.
Those proposals were removed from the Senate bill, S. 649, amid opposition by the National Rifle Association, the nation’s largest gun lobby, which claims 4 million members.
The NRA’s top lobbyist, Chris Cox, said in a statement after the vote that “expanding background checks, at gun shows or elsewhere, will not reduce violent crime or keep our kids safe in their schools.”
The NRA had said expanded background checks would lead to a national gun registry.
Federal law bars such a registry, and licensed gun dealers have kept sales records since 1968.
Five Democrats voted against the background-check measure: Reid, Max Baucus of Montana, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Mark Begich of Alaska and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota. Baucus, Pryor and Begich face re-election in 2014 in states carried last year by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Reid also voted no, allowing himself under Senate rules to seek reconsideration of the vote.
Republicans Mark Kirk of Illinois, John McCain of Arizona, Susan Collins of Maine and Toomey voted for the amendment.
Pryor called the approach“broad and unworkable.”
Instead, he favored a Republican replacement amendment pushed by Iowa’s Sen. Charles Grassley.
The amendment would beef up school security and increase funding for gun-violation prosecutions and mental-health treatment, but it would not place new limits on gun ownership.
“It does a good job protecting law-abiding citizens,” Pryor said.
Sen. John Boozman, a Republican from Rogers, also favored Grassley’s approach. He said the enhanced background checks in the underlying bill and the Manchin-Toomey amendment infringed on people’s constitutional right to bear arms.
He said Grassley’s amendment would help “give prosecutors the tools” to go after people who obtain firearms illegally.
“It would make it so there are real teeth in the current law,” he said.
Republican Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama also opposed the expanded background checks, calling them a “legislative misfire.”
“Who knows what will come next?” Shelby said. “These restrictions will not prevent the next tragedy.” Congress should instead focus on “glorified violence” in Hollywood, he said.
Manchin spoke on the Senate floor about the resistant Democrats and Republicans.
“I understand that some of our colleagues believe that supporting this piece of legislation is risky politics,” Manchin said.
“I think there’s a time in our life that’s a defining time, when you know the facts are on your side and you walk into the lion’s den and look that lion in the eye, and tell that lion, ‘Not today.’”
McCain took the floor to applaud Manchin and Toomey for “political courage.”
“You may not win today, but you did the right thing,” McCain said. “Doing the right thing is always a reward in itself.”
Mandatory background checks for most gun purchasers are supported by 91 percent of U.S. voters, including 96 percent of Democrats, 88 percent of Republicans and 88 percent of gun-owning households, according to a Quinnipiac University poll conducted March 27-April 1. The university surveyed 1,711 registered voters with a margin of error of 2.4 percentage points.
Reid voted for a renewed ban on assault weapons offered in a separate amendment, reversing his earlier opposition.
“Assault weapons have one purpose and one purpose only, to kill a large number of people really quick,” Reid said.
California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, sponsor of the assault-weapon ban, urged fellow senators to “show some guts.”
“We’re here on six-year terms for a reason: to take votes on difficult issues,” Feinstein said before her amendment failed on a 40-60 vote.
A group of gun-violence survivors and relatives were in the Senate chamber to witness the vote, including Lori Haas, whose daughter Emily survived the mass shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007.
“Reid is a smart man,” Haas said. If he didn’t have the votes, “why wouldn’t he wait a few more days?”
“Shame on you!” Patricia Maisch of Tucson shouted from the visitors’ gallery after the Senate vote result was announced. Maisch had helped overpower the gunman when Giffords was shot.
“They need to be ashamed of themselves,” Maisch said as she was being escorted from the Capitol. “They have no souls. They have no compassion.”
Giffords wrote in a Twitter message: “Senate ignored will of the people & rejected background checks. Im not giving up. Constituents will know they obeyed gun lobby and not them.”
The Senate legislation also would increase funding for school safety and set new penalties for gun trafficking. It gained momentum last week when Manchin and Toomey agreed on the bolstered background-check plan.
Still, several Democrats from pro-gun states balked. Democratic leaders said they needed as many as 10 Republican votes to adopt the expanded background-check measure. Democrats control the Senate 55-45.
The president has campaigned across the U.S. for his gun proposals, and he took relatives of Newtown victims to Washington on Air Force One last week to lobby lawmakers for their support.
Current law requires background checks for gun purchases from federally licensed dealers. Manchin and Toomey’s proposal would expand that to include purchases from private dealers at gun shows and over the Internet. It would exempt noncommercial gun sales or transfers between family members.
The Senate also defeated an amendment that would allow people with concealed-weapon permits to carry hidden firearms into other states, including those with stricter standards for issuing permits. Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas proposed the measure.
“I have a great deal of concern about concealed carry,” New York Sen. Charles Schumer, a Democrat, said earlier this week. “New York City is not Wyoming.”
Reid, a longtime gun rights advocate who had thrown himself behind the gun-control measures, is expected to pull the overall gun bill from the Senate floor and move on to an Internet sales tax measure, then an overhaul of immigration policy.
Meanwhile, Obama regrouped over dinner Wednesday night with a dozen Democratic senators, attempting to press ahead on other elements of his agenda.
Emerging from a hotel blocks from the White House, two senators said they were not supposed to talk about what was discussed during the dinner, which spanned more than two hours. But the White House said Obama and the senators discussed immigration, the economy and the need for the House and Senate to find a compromise on the budget.
Information for this article was contributed by Heidi Przybyla, James Rowley Kathleen Hunter of Bloomberg News; by staff members of The Associated Press; by Jonathan Weisman of The New York Times; and by Alex Daniels of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 04/18/2013