I mean, there's a Democratic majority. And a few Republicans, including my own Republican senator, were willing to give it an "Aye".
But, no, a bunch of Democrats defected and gave it a "No."
A visibly angry President Barack Obama blasted the Senate’s rejection of a bipartisan proposal to expand background checks on gun sales, a vote that essentially ends any hope for major gun control legislation for the time being.
Anyway, I figured it would pass the Senate at least, partly because I kept reading that polls indicated the law had popular support.
Afterwards, trying to make sense of it, I reminded myself of 2 things:
1) Every state, no matter how thinly populated and rural, gets 2 senators. That means there's a bias toward places where people are comfortable with gun ownership.
2) The popular support for the new law was probably thin - including lots of gun-undecideds who had been nudged into supporting it by weeks of media campaigning, but who aren't really that enthused about it. I mean, everybody would like to do something to prevent another school massacre, but this bill didn't seem like it would have stopped the last one. On the other side of the ledger book, there were a lot of pro-gun voters who were going to be really upset about the new law - seeing it as an infringement of their rights. In other words, it was a low-reward, high-risk sort of vote for a politician.
Thus the law went on to meet
bipartisan defeat.
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