Representation, Gun Control, and the Senate: Why Background Checks Failed

After a mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, the nation experienced a new episode of the paradox of gun control: legislative efforts to increase firearms regulations commonly fail despite high levels of public support. In April 2013, the U.S. Senate failed to agree upon a measure to require background checks for all gun purchases. This paper analyzes the Senate debate to determine the institutional and organizational sources of the bill’s defeat. Unlike prior studies of gun control, this paper finds that partisanship played a major role: support for gun control was influenced by party affiliation, state-level partisanship, and whether the senator was a Democrat running for reelection. Furthermore, this paper finds that the Senate’s supermajority rules and malapportionment made it especially difficult for gun control to succeed in the Senate