It’s become an all-too-familiar pattern.
Efforts to tighten firearm regulations are typically revived in the wake of high-profile mass shootings, like the string of massacres over the last two weeks in Gilroy, El Paso and Dayton, where 36 people were killed, including two of the suspects, and more than 60 were injured.
Demands for political leaders to "do something" in the aftermath of these horrific events — as demonstrators demanded of President Trump during his visit Wednesday to Dayton, Ohio — are often met with responses long on consolation and short on policy. Just about every federal legislative attempt in recent years to make guns harder to buy has been quickly shot down.
Case in point: On June 12, 2016, a gunman wielding a semiautomatic rifle and handgun terrorized a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing 49 people and wounding scores more. At the time it marked the deadliest mass shooting committed by a single person in U.S. history, a somber milestone eclipsed in October 2017 when another lone shooter mowed down 58 people and injured more than 500 others at a country music festival in Las Vegas.
Eight days later, Senate Democrats tried to push through a set of bills to expand background checks to gun shows and internet sales, as well as prevent anyone on the U.S. terror watch list from purchasing them. But these relatively modest measures were quickly scrapped by the Republican-controlled Senate. Legislation in 2013 — proposed in the months after a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut — suffered a similar fate.
Enshrined as a fundamental right in the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, firearms have played a pivotal and contentious role in America's history and culture.
Federal gun regulations, though, were largely nonexistent until fairly recently. And it wasn't until the late 1970s that gun control emerged as one of the most explosive and divisive issues in American politics.
The following timeline details some of the milestones in the convoluted history of U.S. gun rights and restrictions.
Gun rights advocates, including almost all Republican members of Congress, stand firmly, with few exceptions, against almost any new restrictions. Buoyed by the lobbying efforts and hefty campaign contributions of the powerful gun rights lobby, they argue that stricter gun laws deprive law-abiding Americans of their constitutional right to protect themselves.
But supporters of stricter gun control point to America's exceptional rate of gun violence, one that is far higher than in any other industrialized nation. In 2017 alone, there were nearly 40,000 gun deaths — almost two-thirds of them suicides — the highest toll since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began keeping track 50 years ago.
Gun control advocates contend that the only real way to reduce the carnage is to make guns harder to get. U.S. firearm laws, they say, are remarkably lax, allowing easy access to military-scale guns and accessories capable of mass destruction.