In the months after the Sutherland Springs shooting, Cornyn teamed up with Democratic Sens. Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal, both of Connecticut, to craft and push the Fix NICS bill to reinforce that reporting requirement to the FBI’s background check system and to create financial incentives for states to do so. Then-President Donald Trump signed the bill into law in March 2018….

Senator John Cornyn

While some hard-line groups such as Gun Owners of America came out strongly against the bill, the NRA quietly supported it, noting that it would “not add any new disqualifications to federal law” and was “concerned entirely with enforcing the current prohibitions.”…

But another recent effort, launched last year after Democrats won the Senate majority and threatened to pass more expansive gun control bills, did not pan out.

It was aimed at expanding the universe of federal background checks by clarifying the definition of who is required to register as a federal firearms dealer and thus process background checks. This would go some way toward closing what is frequently called the “gun show loophole” or “private seller loophole” that has been exploited by some mass shooters, such as the gunman who killed six people in 2019 in West Texas.

Cornyn and Murphy engaged on the topic in March 2021 and expressed optimism that a deal was in sight. But some gun rights groups told their members that Cornyn was preparing to sell them out behind closed doors.

“If John Cornyn, who represents the state of TEXAS, is already considering stabbing gun owners in the back, then you know that we’re truly in a DIRE situation,” one email from Gun Owners of America read.

By June, Murphy told reporters that a deal simply was not going to come together: What Cornyn was willing to give on would not “meaningfully increase the number of gun sales that require background checks.” And so died the last significant bipartisan gun talks in the Senate — until this week.

Read more at The Washington Post