Inside Mitch McConnell’s decades-long effort to block gun control

WASHINGTON – Mitch McConnell was just finishing up his first term as the junior senator from Kentucky when a mass shooting rocked his hometown of Louisville.

On Sept. 14, 1989, a disgruntled employee entered the Standard Gravure printing plant in downtown Louisville and, armed with an AK-47 and other guns, killed eight and wounded 12 others before taking his own life – in what remains the deadliest mass shooting in the state’s history.

At the time, mass shootings had not yet become the staple of American life that they are now, and McConnell said he was “deeply disturbed,” declaring, “We must take action to stop such vicious crimes.”

But he also added: “We need to be careful about legislating in the middle of a crisis.” And in the days and weeks after, he did not join others in calling for a ban on assault weapons like the AK-47 used by the shooter.

The Standard Gravure massacre provided an early glimpse of how McConnell – now the Republican Senate minority leader – would handle mass shootings and their aftermath over the next three decades, consistently working to delay, obstruct or prevent most major gun control legislation from passing Congress.

McConnell would go on to follow a similar playbook time and time again during his seven terms in Congress, offering vague promises of action, often without any specifics, only to be followed by no action or incremental measures that avoided new gun regulations. As a Republican leader, he also helped dissuade his conference – as after the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. – from supporting gun legislation and, as majority leader, refused to bring up significant gun control measures for a vote.

Now, the latest devastating and high-profile mass shootings – a massacre Tuesday at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, TexAS, that left 19 students and two teachers dead, just 10 days after a racist slaughter at Buffalo supermarket that killed 10 – have thrust Congress back into a fiery debate over what, if anything, lawmakers can do to curb gun violence.

On Thursday, McConnell told CNN that he had encouraged Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, to reach out to Sens. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., and Chris Murphy, D-Conn. – who made gun control a personal project after Sandy Hook – to begin discussing what bipartisan measures might be possible.

But many Democrats and anti-gun advocates remain skeptical, predicting that McConnell and his fellow Republicans are poised to obstruct any consequential gun-violence prevention bills yet again.

“If there’s any one individual in the United States to blame for our inability to put things in place to prevent gun violence, it’s Mitch McConnell,” said Peter Ambler, the executive director of Giffords, a group devoted to fighting gun violence. “McConnell understands he’s hostage to that extreme base that just doesn’t tolerate any departure from any of their views.”

Many Republicans say that McConnell is less a singular obstacle than a savvy leader who is able to his read his conference and make decisions that help his senators and protect them politically. “McConnell knows where his members stand and makes the tough calls to protect their interests,” a senior Republican aide said, explaining McConnell’s overall motivations in addressing gun violence and gun legislation.

McConnell declined to comment.

In 1990, the year after the Standard Standard Gravure shooting, McConnell was up for reelection and found himself in a close race with Democrat Harvey Sloane, then the Jefferson County judge executive and a former Louisville mayor, who had called for banning assault weapons.

In 2013, following Sandy Hook, Sloane recounted in Louisville’s Courier-Journal newspaper that as his race with McConnell tightened in the final stretch, McConnell and the National Rifle Association “blistered the state falsely as to how this ban would eventually take away ‘your hunting gun and the hand pistol you need for personal protection.’ “

McConnell defeated Sloane by five percentage points and, in his second term in the Senate, went on to vote against both the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act in 1993 and the Federal Assault Weapons Ban in 1994.

“Mitch is really Machiavellian,” Sloane said in an interview with The Washington Post last week. “He’s single-handedly held up any kind of gun legislation that’s meaningful.”

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In September 2019, a group of gun control advocates – including Kris Brown, the president of Brady, a gun violence prevention organization; Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., a civil rights icon; and Rep. Lucy McBath, D-Ga., who lost her 17-year-old son in a 2012 shooting – gathered on the West Lawn of the Capitol for a rally in favor of tougher background checks.

After the rally, some in the group – which also included some McConnell constituents – decided to make their way to the then-majority leader’s office for what Lewis might have called “good trouble.”

“So we walked over, John Lewis kind of leading us, talking about the importance of peaceful resistance,” Brown recalled, adding that Lewis asked if someone should get Depends – a brand of adult diapers – because the group might be there for a while.

“His staffers had no idea what to do with us,” Brown said. “McConnell didn’t have the human decency to sit down with John Lewis.”

Instead, a McConnell staffer ushered the group into a conference room and met with them for over an hour. Brown said that the staffer clearly seemed moved by Lewis, telling him that she held him in high esteem, and by the victims of gun violence, who recounted their stories one after another.

“She was moved to tears, but it didn’t change a thing,” Brown said, saying the staffer essentially told the group “that it was just the wrong time to bring this bill forward.”

Doug Andres, a McConnell spokesman, said McConnell had been unable to meet with the group at the time because it was a surprise visit and he already had constituent meetings planned. He said the staffer simply explained to the group that then-president Donald Trump was unlikely to sign the bill they were pitching, and McConnell was not going to advocate for legislation he knew would fail.

For McConnell, however, the time has rarely seemed right.

Almost immediately after Sandy Hook, then-President Barack Obama tasked then-Vice President Joe Biden with putting together a robust policy response. McConnell – then the Senate minority leader – downplayed the effort.

Asked about gun control issues on ABC’s “This Week” in January 2013 – less than month after Sandy Hook – McConnell said he was waiting to see Biden’s proposal but did not plan to prioritize it over other issues like “spending and debt” in the coming months.

Then, later that month – after Obama signed 23 executive orders on guns in response to the tragedy that left 20 kindergartners dead – McConnell recorded a robocall and sent it out to gun owners in his state.

“President Obama and his team are doing everything in their power to restrict your constitutional right to keep and bear arms,” McConnell said in the recording. “Their efforts to restrict your rights, invading your personal privacy and overstepping their bounds with executive orders, is just plain wrong.”

McConnell also refused a meeting with the Sandy Hook families, according to someone familiar with the request, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal details. But eventually, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., negotiated a modest bipartisan background checks bill, known as Manchin-Toomey.

At the time, McConnell was still adjusting to the rise of the hard-right tea party movement in the Republican base; in the 2010 Republican Senate primary in Kentucky, Rand Paul vanquished Trey Grayson, McConnell’s handpicked candidate, by riding the tea party wave in what some also viewed as a stinging rebuke of McConnell. And by 2013, McConnell was already preparing for his 2014 reelection bid.

When Manchin-Toomey finally came to the Senate floor for a vote in April 2013, McConnell pushed his conference to oppose the bill, which ultimately failed 54-46, falling short of the 60 votes needed for passage.

“McConnell whipped hard against it. McConnell is obsessed with protecting his right flank,” said Adam Jentleson, who at the time worked for then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., explaining why McConnell helped tank the background check bill. “It’s why he’s been able to survive as leader for so long.”

Jesse Benton – a conservative activist who managed Paul’s 2010 Senate campaign and who McConnell enlisted to manage his 2014 one – said that McConnell at the time “said something to me like, ‘I…