Illustration by Tom Bachtell

What’s the worst that could happen? That’s what people sometimes ask friends who are considering taking a step that carries a risk but also stands to change their lives for the better. It’s what people ought to be asking Congress, in particular those senators—Republicans and a few Democrats—who are holding up federal action on gun safety. Last week, it became apparent that the gun-control measures that President Obama and many others have championed since the killings in Newtown, Connecticut, were losing support in Congress. The Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, had already acknowledged that a renewal of the assault-weapons ban was a no-go. But requiring background checks for gun buyers not currently subject to them—a reform that polls show is supported by ninety per cent of Americans and by eighty-five per cent of gun owners, and which the N.R.A. itself supported as recently as 1999—is now, the Washington Post reported, “in jeopardy amid a fierce lobbying campaign by firearms advocates.” This development was, among other things, evidence of the peculiar paralysis in Congress. In the period during which Senate negotiations failed to yield compromise, and Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, had been unable to find a single Republican co-sponsor for a bill that expanded background checks, four states had managed to move forward with gun-control laws: New York, Colorado, and, last week, Connecticut and Maryland.

What do senators think is the worst that could happen if they get back on board with the legislation? Maybe it’s that they will vote for a bill, despite their speculative concerns that it will create an intrusive federal registry (something like that intrusive federal registry of people with bad driving records, or of people with passports, or of people born in the United States), and then the law will have no effect. That’s an argument that gun-rights advocates have been making, and that David Brooks put forth in the Times last month: while the violent-crime rate has been falling since the mid-nineteen-nineties, neither the Brady act, of 1993, nor the assault-weapons ban, of 1994, can be directly credited for the reduction. The rate continued to fall even after the assault-weapons ban expired, in 2004. But there are studies that indicate a different picture. One, published last month by the American Medical Association, shows that states with more, and stricter, firearm laws have fewer firearm fatalities, even controlling for those states’ socioeconomic characteristics. Moreover, the Brady act may not have yielded a bigger drop in gun crime because of the very loophole that a new background-check law would close: currently, only people who buy guns from licensed dealers have to undergo such a check, whereas the 2004 National Firearms Survey suggests that some forty per cent of gun owners acquire their weapons from non-licensed suppliers.

It’s true, too, that a background check would not have stopped Adam Lanza, who had no criminal record, and whose mother had reportedly bought the guns he used in Newtown. But laws influence culture, just as culture influences laws, and if Congress enacted a serious piece of gun-control legislation perhaps that might initiate a subtle shift in American attitudes toward guns, and that might eventually lead some parent with a deeply troubled, deeply isolated son fascinated by violence to think twice before turning the family home into a munitions depot. Conversely, if lawmakers won’t pass even a modest reform supported by the vast majority of Americans, they will be capitulating to the N.R.A.’s corrosive view that the only answer to gun violence is more guns.

Maybe the worst-case scenario for Congress is that it passes gun-safety legislation and then the Supreme Court overturns it. As a nation, we’re a little vague on what the Second Amendment’s protections of a citizen militia mean for gun ownership today. The N.R.A. insists that they mean virtually unlimited access to firearms for every American, and it might have looked like a victory for that position when, in 2008, the Supreme Court overturned a Washington, D.C., ban on handguns. But it’s important to remember what the Court also emphasized in that case, District of Columbia v. Heller: “Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.” The opinion was written by the Court’s conservative originalist Antonin Scalia, and it nonetheless reminds us that the Second Amendment does not confer “a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.” He added:

Nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.

The Supreme Court, in other words, would likely uphold any gun-safety legislation that managed to squeak out of this Congress.

Maybe what legislators fear is actual reprisal. After all, they have the examples not only of their former colleague Gabrielle Giffords, who was wounded with a semi-automatic pistol in 2011, but of at least four other public officials—the director of prisons for Colorado, two state prosecutors in Texas, a sheriff in West Virginia—who were shot to death in recent months. But if such a scenario has crossed lawmakers’ minds, surely it hasn’t risen to the level of motivation; if things ever got to that point, our democracy would truly be in peril.

Their worst fear is probably just this: if they vote for the legislation they may lose their seats. The Democrats who, according to the Post, are wobbling toward the gun-rights side are all from conservative, gun-friendly states, and they are all up for reëlection in 2014: Mark Begich, of Alaska; Mark Pryor, of Arkansas; Mary Landrieu, of Louisiana; Max Baucus, of Montana; Kay Hagan, of North Carolina; and Mark R. Warner, of Virginia. The Republican Tom Coburn, of Oklahoma, had been working with Democrats on expanding background checks until, the Times reported last week, he came under intense pressure from Gun Owners of America, a lobbying organization that is more militant than even the N.R.A.

When people ask their friends the worst-case question, what they’re really saying is that even if the worst does happen it may not be as bad as imagined. If members of Congress who support gun safety but are worried about the political consequences vote for it anyway, a few of them may not be reëlected. But if gun safety can’t pass in this Congress, at this moment, what can? And there is still a year and a half before the election to mobilize against the N.R.A. and its allies and its funders in the gun industry. Besides, maybe members of Congress won’t be punished at the polls. They should remember the ninety per cent. ♦