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.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.