Ever since Slick Willie Clinton, all we've ever gotten is political theater in DC, because the rubes keep buying it and not voting out both major parties..

So what else is new? This is exactly what I expected after the school shooting in Texas and the one in Buffalo. Same as with Biden's whole administration other than Covid leadership, which at least has been better than Trump. Otherwise, I expected no real improvement from Biden. What part of "Nothing will fundamentally change...", his private campaign promise to his rich donors, do the rubes who don't matter to him, seem to not get????

Like Obama and the ACA, with an evenly split (and remember,if Manchin and Sinema changed their Party designation, McConnell would be the Majority Leader instead of the Minority and even less would get done. Besides Biden having to veto a lot of Republican bills coming out of the Senate), you take what you can get. It’s not much, but it is the first piece of gun legislation that has come out of Congress in decades. Just like the ACA was the first health insurance law. The only way to get truly Progressive legislation through is with a Democratic super majority in the Senate, and given the state split Red/Blue, I don’t see that happening in my lifetime.

This bill obviously does not go far enough, as President Biden said. It seems that the sponsors of the bill think that the baby step this bill represents is better than nothing. I disagree. I think that it will only serve to temporarily let the Republicans off the hook for their lousy anti-gun control stance while doing nothing to protect kids in schools or the general public. What is needed is a whole suite of gun control measures, including raised age limits for legal purchases, universal background checks (including juvenile records), red flag laws, stiff penalties for straw buyers and possession/manufacture of untraceable guns, a national ban on assault rifles, caps on magazine capacities, mandatory safety training, safe storage requirements, and repeal of laws protecting gun manufacturers from liability for bad outcomes stemming from their marketing practices. We should have all that AND the other, peripheral items like more funding for mental health and better school security. In my opinion, Democrats are committing a tactical error by not holding out for a bill that will actually have a meaningful effect on gun violence in America. And let's face it: even if such a bill were to pass today, it would still be years, maybe decades before the violence dropped significantly. There are already more guns than people in this country, and guns are durable items. We have to be prepared for the long haul.