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, Tex., 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-Tex.) 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 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…
Read More: Inside Mitch McConnell’s decades-long effort to block gun control
