After the government shutdown ends _ and it will end whenever President Trump accepts the ample border security funding Democrats are offering rather than demanding an unnecessary wall few Americans want _ the new Congress can get to business.
We badly want Democrats to use their new House majority not to posture, but to pass concrete legislation that improves the lives of ordinary people.
So it's heartening to hear that incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is eager to lead her chamber to intelligently tighten gun laws in a manner supported by nine out of 10 Americans.
Politico reports that Democrats are poised to move a bill to require federal background checks on all gun sales, with small exemptions for transfers between family members and temporary use of a gun for hunting.
Roughly a fifth of all gun sales now escape such checks; sales over the internet, a growing share of all firearm purchases, are a Texas-sized loophole.
Making sure felons and mentally unstable people can't snap their fingers and get their hands on killing machines is as obvious as it gets. Studies show background checks could sharply reduce gun deaths; in the first year of the Trump administration, they hit a 40-year high. Gun homicides and suicides among children and adolescents are also on the rise.
Yet as the bodies pile up, smart money says that even a House-passed bill will be dead on arrival in the Republican-led Senate. Why?
