Sen. Pat Toomey introduced legislation Thursday to try to prevent a potential terrorist from buying a gun, days after the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history, but it did not appear on track to get a vote or bipartisan support.
Toomey, a Republican in the midst of his first re-election campaign, said the bill is an attempt at a compromise between two dueling pieces of legislation, one sponsored by Democrats and the other by Republicans. Both failed in December, nearly along party lines.
Toomey said the legislation takes the best features from both of the previous proposals and tries to fix their flaws while safeguarding the rights of a person who is mistakenly put on a terrorist watch list.
"If my legislation passes, terrorists will be blocked from buying guns," Toomey told reporters Thursday. "If my legislation passes, people who can't fly on a plane will be legally forbidden from buying guns. That's a lot of progress from where we are today."
Toomey also warned that bickering lawmakers need to decide whether they want to get something done, or keep arguing and trying to score political points.
"I'm tired of the talking," Toomey said. "I am trying to get something done."
For Toomey, finding compromise on gun control has become something of a signature issue in his first term. However, he said he did not know whether he would get a vote on the measure, and he acknowledged that he had not seen senators moving to support it.
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Republicans scheduled votes for Monday on several other competing bills, all of which looked destined to fail, and it could force Toomey into deciding on how to vote on bills he criticized Thursday as badly flawed.
Democrats swiftly rejected Toomey's bill, saying it would create too much of a backlog in the courts. Meanwhile, the campaign of Toomey's Democratic challenger, Katie McGinty, called the bill a "political calculation" that would do little to "close the terror gun loophole or stop shootings from happening."
"Instead, it would make it more difficult for law enforcement to stop suspected terrorists from buying guns," the McGinty campaign said Thursday.
The Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen, was added to a government watch list of individuals known or suspected of being involved in terrorist activities in 2013, when he was investigated for inflammatory statements to co-workers. He was pulled from that database when that investigation was closed 10 months later.
Under Toomey's measure, the U.S. attorney general could assemble a list of people suspected of supporting terrorism.
Names on the list would have to be approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, according to Toomey's office. People on it would be blocked from immediately buying a firearm, although federal prosecutors would then have seven days to ask for a judge's approval to make that block permanent, Toomey's office said.
Federal authorities also would have the ability on an emergency basis to seek a judge's approval to add a name to the list, Toomey's office said. That window would be three days following the attempted purchase.
McGinty's support for gun control is far broader than Toomey's, including supporting legislation to ban the sale of "military-style" weapons and prohibit the possession of a gun by anyone convicted of or suspected of a misdemeanor hate crime.
Toomey has backed legislation to require background checks for all gun purchases online and at gun shows. Currently, the checks are only required for transactions from licensed gun dealers. That bill was defeated, most recently in December, a day after a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California.
