In June, President Biden signed the first significant gun control legislation in a generation, culminating a process that would have failed without public support and bipartisan cooperation in the Senate.
While some will say the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act is the culmination of a social movement that kicked into a higher gear following the murder of 20 Newtown, Conn., elementary school students in 2012, a Democratic senator and former Republican House member came together Tuesday evening to discuss ways to achieve even more.
Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, one of the architects of the new law, and ex-Rep. Will Hurd, who represented Uvalde, Texas, for three terms, were the featured guests at a Common Ground Committee event to explore where the nation goes next on gun policy.
Murphy and Hurd agreed that two factors drove Congress’ ability to get beyond partisanship and pass significant gun control legislation: demand from the American public and strong inter-party relationships in the Senate.
“There was an imperative from the public to ... get beyond our politics and make some progress,” said Murphy, who led negotiations with Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas while Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema brought in other Republicans.
“It starts with Chris and John Cornyn having the tenacity to stick with this,” Hurd said, but agreed that popular sentiment had shifted in favor of action following the May 24 shooting in Uvalde that resulted in the deaths of 19 children and two teachers. “The public was tired. Fifty percent of teenagers are afraid of getting shot at school. That’s nuts.”
The new law takes a few big steps, including funding implementation of states’ “red flag” laws, closing the “ boyfriend loophole,” requiring stronger background checks for people under age 21 who attempt to buy a gun, requiring more gun sellers to conduct background checks, and establishing new gun crimes for purchasing a gun on behalf of another person.
However, the law does not address some gun control ideas that are popular with the American public.
For example, 92 percent told Gallup in June that they favor background checks for all gun purchases. In March 2021, the House passed a bill that would require universal background checks. Like this summer’s bill, fewer than a dozen Republicans supported it. Murphy introduced a similar bill in the Senate, but that measure never made it out of the Judiciary Committee.
“Its always had massive public support and yet it couldn’t pass. I think the only way you can explain that is through the power of the NRA,” Murphy said.
But Hurd warned against giving the National Rifle Association too much credit for preventing the passage of that measure, or other bills.
“An overreliance on just one entity would take away from how complicated this is and the need to educate members and for people to be active on these types of issues,” he said.
Hurd and Murphy both took issue with polling data that showed Democrats and Republicans divided over whether it’s more important to control gun ownership or protect the right to own guns.
“I think most Americans actually would say we can do both, we can actually protect people’s right to own guns and regulate that right. And the two are not mutually exclusive,” Murphy said.
“When you start with an issue that we agree on, then you can start talking about the things that we should be doing to ultimately solve the problem,” Murphy said.
Both men support an individual’s right to own a gun but believe that right can be regulated, including limiting the type of weapons people can purchase. However, Hurd noted, the politics of gun control has changed significantly since Congress passed a since-expired assault weapons ban in 1994.
“The environment was different on this particular issue,” he said. “There are other things that we should be focusing on in order to start building the momentum to get up to an issue of talking specifically about the weapon.”
While acknowledging data shows limits on assault weapons would likely reduce the number of gun-related murders, Murphy agreed that such a regulation likely isn’t feasible in the current state of politics. According to Gallup, 55 percent of Americans believe there should be a ban on manufacturing, owning or selling assault rifles.
So what’s next for legislation addressing gun violence? Hurd and Murphy expressed optimism that the social movement for changing gun laws has picked up momentum and there is more to come. But if Republicans win control of the House of Representatives in November, gun control advocates will find a far more difficult road to victory.
Nevertheless, they remain hopeful.
“I think the public demands a response,” Hurd said.
Ben Droz
Ben Droz
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Pinnacle Bank Expo Center on the Nebraska State Fairgrounds on October 05, 2026 in Grand Island, Nebraska.
The President Invited Iran to Bomb My Home
I was driving home to San Diego from Los Angeles on Monday night when I heard that the President of the United States had offered both cities up to Iran as bomb targets. At a rally in Nebraska, defending his war, Trump told the crowd, “let [Iran] take out Los Angeles, let ‘em take out San Diego.” It was, he said, “a very small price to pay.”
I was coming from a Bernie Sanders rally for Proposition 40, the one-time tax on California billionaires that would send 90% of its revenue to healthcare. We desperately need it to pass because, in order to give tax breaks to billionaires, Trump signed a law that will strip health coverage from 10 million Americans; this tax will make sure we can still cover Californians. Call me crazy, but I think taxing billionaires one time so we can make sure kids in California get to see a doctor is a very small price to pay. I also think that even if Trump were joking, it is indefensible to make jokes about the potential destruction of so many lives. Human life is never a small price to pay. Human life is priceless.
Plus, the reality is: here in San Diego, we’re already paying the price for Trump’s actions, and it’s not small at all. He has gutted FEMA, tried to kill climate resiliency programs, and destroyed public health standards, while his signature law is set to cut off health insurance and food support for hundreds of thousands of San Diegans. Like plenty of American cities, San Diego is already busy finding local solutions to respond to the problems this president has recklessly created.
Not to mention, at least 19 American service members have been killed in this war already. Human rights monitors have documented more than 3,600 dead in Iran by April alone. Here at home, gas is sitting just pennies below its all-time record. Taxpayers have already spent more than $45 billion on the war, while Trump’s oil and gas portfolio has grown by roughly $15.5 million this year alone. Of course anything is a “small price” to someone paying free.99 for this war, and profiting from it. Meanwhile, We the People are paying twice: first for the war, and then for the consequences of that war. But now he wants San Diego to pay a third time, flippantly offering us up to Iran.
It is worth noticing which cities he thought to name. Were San Diego and Los Angeles strategically chosen to signify something to his audience, or were they simply the first cities that came to mind as expendable places? Either way, the effect is to normalize—-and to gauge a crowd’s reaction to–the idea of massive violence in major California cities, suitable targets because of their perceived liberal lean. So what if Iran needs to bomb a little bit of America before the war can be over? Who cares, says Trump, if they target Los Angeles and San Diego?
By the way, why didn’t he offer up San Francisco, the free-love hippie-town MAGA loves to hate (and also my birthplace)? Could it be because that’s where the tech titans live? The same ones who joined Trump for Xi Jinping’s state dinner, a guest list worth a combined $2.4 trillion?
San Diego may have fewer billionaires, but it is home to more than 115,000 active-duty service members and 230,000 veterans. One in six active-duty sailors–in the entire Navy–is stationed here. So is one in four Marines. You cannot throw a rock in this county without hitting a military family: brats and spouses and veterans are among us. I got out of the Navy last year after ten years, and eight of those were here in San Diego. When Trump says “let ‘em take out San Diego,” he’s talking about the backbone of the United States military. He’s also talking about the people fighting his war.
San Diego has not been watching this war from the sidelines. Today, the USS Abraham Lincoln returns to North Island after an almost yearlong deployment to the Middle East that featured food shortages, broken toilets, and mold in the showers after 286 days at sea without a single port call. Eight sailors in the Lincoln’s strike group attempted suicide, but in August, when a reporter asked whether the deployment had gone on too long, Trump said “not nearly long enough.” Now he has told a crowd in Nebraska that we should let Iran take out the city those sailors call home. These are sociopathic sentiments.
Last week at Quantico, Pete Hegseth closed his address to the force by telling them, “President Trump has your back and so do I.” To the contrary, President Trump has put one of the biggest military towns in the country forward as a target for our adversaries. With friends like these, the “domestic” in “against all enemies, foreign and domestic” starts to sound a lot less hypothetical.
San Diego is home to Naval Air Station North Island, Naval Base San Diego, Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, the Point Loma submarine base, Camp Pendleton, and Miramar (and I have been permanently stationed at or trained at all of them). If Iran bombed San Diego and Los Angeles, aside from the devastating loss of life, it would cripple an immense share of our national security readiness.
And for what, exactly? Trump says the war is “essentially almost over with.” This is the same man who claimed in June 2025 that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated,” then launched a war over it anyway on February 28. More than seven months later, he wants us to believe two things at once: that we’ve basically won, and that we might need to sacrifice an American city or two to finish winning. If the war is almost over, why does anybody need to take out San Diego?
I wonder if Trump’s endorsed candidate for California’s 48th District here in San Diego County will respond to these remarks. He recently said “no pain, no gain,” when referring to the gas prices San Diegans are paying. Jim Desmond, would you apply that same mindset if we were bombed? Or do you have the moral courage to stand up for the people you’re running to represent?
Last November, six Democratic members of Congress, all veterans, including Senator Mark Kelly, recorded a video reminding troops of their duty to disobey unlawful orders, restating the law that says so. Trump called it “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH,” and then his Justice Department went looking for an indictment, which a grand jury refused. The president treated reading the law out loud to the troops as a capital offense, but then he himself invited a foreign enemy to destroy two American cities, possibly as a punchline. Is anyone calling the latter sedition? Who is demanding accountability?
Calling our lives a small price to pay affirms a moral bankruptcy, as well as an obvious dereliction of duty to the office he holds. While we can’t impeach him or invoke the 25th Amendment ourselves, we must stop being so quiet about what we’re paying already. We can make our voices heard by calling our representatives, writing op-eds, knocking doors, phone banking, and voting in defiance of the man who threatens the safety of our city. Ballots are already arriving in mailboxes. Vote, and vote yes on 40 (and no on 41 and 42).
Trump has been harming our cities for a while, but now he is inviting our military adversaries to join him in the harm. If we have any self-respect as Americans, we must not tolerate our leaders disregarding the dignity of lives in this way. We must fight for our home.
Julie Roland was a Naval Officer for ten years, deploying to both the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf as a helicopter pilot before separating in June 2025 as a Lieutenant Commander. She has a law degree from the University of San Diego, a Master of Laws from Columbia University, and is a member of the Truman National Security Project.