GOP and Democrats Announce Compromise on Gun Control; Aide Says it Wouldn't Have Stopped Newtown

Republican Pat Toomey and Democrat Joe Manchin announced a gun bill compromise to expand background checks earlier today. The legislation is in direct response to the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December.

“This amendment won’t ease the pain … but nobody here, not one of us in this great capital of ours in good conscious could sit by and not try to prevent a day like that from happening again,” Manchin told the press at today’s announcement.

But aides on Capitol Hill admit that there is not a thing in the bill that would have prevented the killer, Adam Lanza, from killing 26 at the school in Newtown, Connecticut.

“There’s nothing in this legislation that addresses the fact pattern at Sandy Hook,” a senior Senate aide told me on the phone.

The aide explains that the bill expands on the background-check system already in place, but that the system doesn’t work properly. “They are expanding on a broken system that we know will fail,” says the aide.

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