Michael Tomasky: “How stupid does the Senate background-check vote look now, I ask the pundits and others who thought it was dumb politics for Obama and the Democrats to push for a vote that they obviously knew they were going to lose. I’d say not very stupid at all. The nosedive taken in the polls by a number of senators who voted against the bill, most of them in red states, makes public sentiment here crystal clear. And now, for the first time since arguably right after the Reagan assassination attempt–a damn long time, in other words–legislators in Washington are feeling political heat on guns that isn’t coming from the NRA. This bill will come back to the Senate, maybe before the August recess, and it already seems possible and maybe even likely to have 60 votes next time.”

The RNC put out a new ad which criticizes President Obama on the failure of his legislative agenda — including gun control — and uses a black and white photo of the president reaching to embrace the mother of a Sandy Hook shooting victim.

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Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) told the Times Herald that some Republicans opposed his amendment to expand gun background checks because they didn’t want to “be seen helping the president.”

Said Toomey: “In the end it didn’t pass because we’re so politicized. There were some on my side who did not want to be seen helping the president do something he wanted to get done, just because the president wanted to do it.”

“In subsequent comments, he tried to walk that remark part-way back by
noting he meant to say Republicans across the nation in general, not
just those in the Senate.”

Ruby Cramer points out that after Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) announced last week “that he would not seek reelection in 2014, advocates on both sides of the gun control battle have flooded Montana with ads — a sign that they believe the Democrat, now free from the weight of reelection, could switch his vote on the bill that Sen. Joe Manchin has promised to somehow revive on the floor of the Senate.”

The latest ad “features a Claire Kelly, a gun-owning Montana voter, who urges Baucus to change his vote, citing a poll by the Michael Bloomberg-headed gun control group, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, that shows 79 percent of Montanans support background checks for gun sales.”

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