Six weeks after their reelection, the president put Joe Biden in charge of the most serious push for gun control in decades, sparked by the massacre of children at Sandy Hook Elementary. It seemed like the moment when national outrage might lead to congressional action.

Biden did not deliver.


Four months after Biden took on the mission, a modest measure to require expanded background checks died on the Senate floor.

POLITICO interviews with more than a dozen people involved in the effort show that Biden made several strategic missteps that delayed action and may have sacrificed the emotional pull that offered a chance to break a historic logjam. He urged grieving families who wanted to take their case to Capitol Hill to go home, trying to protect them from difficult conversations.

Known as a deal-maker and Senate insider, he tried to build consensus the old-fashioned way, schmoozing former colleagues over many weeks to try to persuade them to change positions. But the process dragged on so long that some believe Biden lost his moment of opportunity.

Biden attended only a few of the 20 meetings with advocates from both sides of the debate and deferred to Senate Democrats to make some of the most important strategic decisions.

None of the advocates, Hill aides, current and former senators, White House officials and others close to the negotiations holds Biden personally responsible for defeat in another battle with the fearsome gun lobby. They praise him for showing exceptional kindness to the Newtown parents, including personal calls after the shootings, and applaud his long commitment to gun control.

But how Biden handled a tough, some believe impossible, assignment offers a window into his leadership style at a moment when he is weighing a possible run for the Democratic nomination for the presidency.

“There is no cause that matters more to Vice President Biden than guns,” said a spokesperson for the vice president in an email. “He has been in this battle for a long time and is the author of the last significant gun control legislation. Since Newtown, he worked to get 25 executive actions implemented and spent countless hours working with Congress to pass legislation to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally unstable. And that is why he has continued to press for additional actions. This fight is a long way from being over.”

Biden urged the president to take action on gun control early in the administration.

“Even before Newtown, the vice president had wanted the administration to push harder on the issue," said Bruce Reed, Biden’s chief of staff at the time.

President Barack Obama turned to him after the 2012 school attack by gunman Adam Lanza left 26 dead. The president gave Biden a month to come up with “concrete proposals” for both executive action and legislation. The president publicly fretted about timing.

“I would hope that our memories aren't so short that what we saw in Newtown isn't lingering with us, that we don't remain passionate about it only a month later,” Obama said.

Biden was skeptical that anything could happen quickly, although he said he was witnessing “a consensus that is different” after the slayings of children. As a senator, he’d written the last major gun legislation, the now-expired assault weapons ban, debated for years before it passed in 1994. The Brady Bill passed the year before and established background checks for gun purchasers — 12 years after James Brady was left partially paralyzed by a bullet meant for Ronald Reagan.

Two months after the Newtown shootings, Biden visited nearby Danbury, Connecticut, and reported progress. “There’s a consensus on the types of action everybody thinks are reasonable we should take,” he said. Biden cited meetings with “every possible stakeholder in this debate; 229 separate groups — not individuals — groups,” including potential opponents like the National Rifle Association and producers of violent video games.

But the weeks of meetings, all part of Biden’s consensus-building strategy, in retrospect seem like a critical blunder to many of his allies, who now think the focus should have been on just getting out a bill.

“If by some chance there could’ve been some reasonable bill on the floor in January,” said a high-level Senate aide involved in the negotiations, there would have been “less time for people to sort of become ambivalent.”





“There is no cause that matters more to Vice President Biden than guns,” said a spokesperson for the vice president. "And that is why he has continued to press for additional actions. This fight is a long way from being over.” | Getty

By mid-January, Biden delivered some proposals, including a list of executive actions. None of the ideas was particularly original; one gun safety advocate characterized the options as, “Here’s the file of stuff that we could do on guns, they pulled it out of a drawer."

Obama announced 23 executive actions but made clear that the moves were “in no way a substitute” for new legislation. He called on Congress to pass three laws: universal background checks, a new assault weapons ban, and a prohibition on the types of multi-round clips that Lanza used to fire so many shots, so fast.

Biden believed that he could at least build legislative backing for a modest proposal to expand background checks to gun shows and Internet sales. More challenging was a proposal backed by Senate liberals to ban assault weapons.

“He was the one who had the keen pulse on law enforcement and the keen pulse on where the American public stands on that,” said John Feinblatt, who represented the group New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg founded to promote gun control at Biden’s strategy sessions, now known as Everytown for Gun Safety.

Behind the scenes, Biden was “instrumental” in convincing more liberal Democrats that there was no point in fighting for anything beyond a background check bill proposed by Sens. Joe Manchin and Chuck Schumer, said the Senate aide.

But publicly, Biden continued calling for restoring the assault weapons ban through March, in part out of respect for longtime crusaders like Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), fueling coverage that focused on discord within the Democratic Party.

While others were concerned about timing, Biden believed it was pointless to send a bill to the floor without a conservative Republican cosponsor. His team hoped for a robust Senate showing — it estimated 75 ayes — that would then pressure the Republican-run House to act.

Biden’s aide Reed continued the weekly meetings in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building with various gun-control groups — more than 20 sessions between the shooting and the April 17 vote. (Participants recalled Biden attending at least two of them.)

"Vice President Biden and his staff — particularly Bruce Reed — brought incredible intensity and ingenuity to effort to pass background checks,” said Arkadi Gerney, a senior vice president at the Center for American Progress, a regular at the gatherings.

Soon, Biden narrowed his focus to convincing one person to get behind the effort: Sen. Tom Coburn, the idiosyncratic Oklahoma Republican.

Biden met with Coburn for over an hour at the White House to discuss the senator’s unconventional alternative background-check proposal. Obama also called Coburn, a friend from his Senate days, and they believed the Oklahoman, who left office early this year, was on the cusp of signing on. Manchin and the gun control groups zeroed in on Coburn, too.

“Six weeks were wasted trying to negotiate with a guy who was notoriously difficult to negotiate with,” said Gerney. Meanwhile, the searing impact of Newtown was fast fading, and the gun lobby stepped up its media efforts in the states.

Manchin and Schumer eventually gave up on Coburn, turning instead to Sen. Pat Toomey, a Pennsylvania Republican, in April. From Biden's perspective, Pennsylvania was too purple a state to give anyone else political cover, and in the end, Toomey's addition didn't bring on anyone new.

But while Biden may have been right, he didn't assert his position. He left the negotiations to the senators, again part of his strategy not to intrude too heavily. Biden had a longtime beef that the Obama White House gave inadequate deference to Congress.

Reed said there were strategic imperatives for leaving tactical maneuvers to Manchin, Schumer and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid: “Republicans would sooner negotiate a nuclear deal with the ayatollah than a gun bill with the White House.”

Biden advisers said he did talk to 25 Democrats and 15 Republicans more than once, lobbying them with long phone conversations and trips to his old Senate stomping grounds.

Biden’s allies note that he got support from six NRA A-rated senators, although they did not directly attribute those victories to Biden.

“Biden would never boast about which senators he would talk to,” Feinblatt said.

Biden hoped to use his negotiating skills and personal relationships to convince at-risk Democrats and long-serving Republicans, but he resisted making a political case.

“His view is: Never tell another elected official what’s in their political interest,” Reed said. “So his arguments were always why this was the right thing to do, why the arguments against it were wrong, how much it mattered to the country, how much it mattered to the families.”

So when one retiring Republican senator said he didn’t want to take a purely symbolic vote because the bill had no shot in the House, Biden had no response.

Despite their warm friendship, Biden couldn’t convince another retiring senator, Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) to back the bill, either.

Four Democrats also helped sink the background check bill. Among them was Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, who announced his retirement just a week after the Manchin-Toomey vote. Gun control advocates were furious when Obama named him ambassador to China a year later.

The gun control movement realizes the fight is far from over, with a recent mass shooting at an Oregon community college underscoring the issue. In 2012, when Biden took the lead, the movement was relatively immature compared to the grass-roots machine behind the National Rifle Association.

“He was the first to say that we needed to build the intensity gap,” said Feinblatt. “We’ve got generals, and now we need the army.”

And that’s what groups like Everytown and Americans for Responsible Solutions have done, racking up state victories on background checks. But most have written off trying again in Congress anytime soon.

Many of the Sandy Hook parents have been involved in the state efforts, and there’s widespread agreement that their lobbying on Capitol Hill — they met with nearly half the Senate ahead of the vote — turned out to be the movement’s best asset.

Biden, trying to be sensitive, met with the parents after the massacre and initially encouraged these early volunteers in the “army” not to get so involved.

"Vice President Biden said, ‘Please don’t do this now, go home and take care of your families, take some time to heal,’” recalled Mark Barden, who came to a meeting at the EEOB with a dozen other Newtown parents in February, just months after his son Daniel was shot in a classroom.

Biden hosted the families again in April at his residence, ahead of their lobbying push. He struck an optimistic tone but warned them about the resistance they’d face.

“That was basically the beginning of us shaping the notion that this was a marathon,” said Barden, who still advocates for stricter gun laws as a founder of Sandy Hook Promise.

Biden called Barden from his car was on his way to Obama’s 2014 State of the Union address.

“Mark, I just wanted to tell you I’ve been thinking about you,” the vice president said, in Barden’s recollection. “I wish we’d be up there telling you that we’d been able to do more.”

Despite Biden’s warnings, Barden said the families were still shocked by Manchin-Toomey’s failure.

“That hasn’t softened our resolve any,” said Barden. “I know it hasn’t softened his any.”