In the aftermath of the Lewiston shootings, U.S. Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, introduced sweeping gun reform legislation that would regulate how guns are manufactured. The goal was to make guns less lethal, and less likely to cause mass casualties.

But the bill – called the GOSAFE Act – has failed to gain traction in the Senate this year.

Despite being introduced last November by King and Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-New Mexico, the bill has not even received a committee hearing.

King, who is running for reelection this fall against Republican challenger Demi Kouzounas, Democrat David Costello and independent Jason Cherry, said in an interview that he is disappointed but not surprised.

“It’s very frustrating because it’s a good bill,” King said. “But the gun issue has become so polarized that you can’t talk about anything.”

Rather than ban specific types of assault weapons as others have proposed, King’s bill would limit the bullet capacity of magazines to 10 rounds for rifles and shotguns, and 15 rounds for handguns. The bill would ban detachable magazines that make it easy to rapidly reload weapons. The magazines would instead be a fixed, internal component of the gun, and weapons would have to be reloaded manually.

The bill was part of King’s response to the Lewiston mass shooting, where 18 people were killed at two locations on Oct. 25, 2023. The shooter, Robert Card, had high-capacity magazines on his AR-10 rifle.

Margaret Groban, a board member of the Maine Gun Safety Coalition, which has long advocated for gun reforms, said she’s not surprised King’s bill didn’t go anywhere, despite it being a “creative” solution to limit the harm that can be done by a mass shooter with a military-style rifle. Alternative efforts to ban certain types of rifles have failed.

“I’m not surprised that nothing happened with it,” Groban said. “It just shows how partisan this is, and how so many people have a knee-jerk reaction to a commonsense bill.”

King’s bill has so far not attracted any Republican support. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, considered one of the most moderate Republicans in the Senate, has not taken an official position on the bill.

Annie Clark, a Collins spokeswoman, said in an email response to questions that Collins will be “watching closely” should the bill make it to the Senate Finance Committee, which is the committee to which the bill has been referred.

“That’s where proposed legislation gets more closely examined and refined,” Clark said in a written response. “Committee hearings and markups give senators the chance to hear from experts and develop a more complete understanding of the proposed legislation. It’s also where committee members can debate the benefits of a bill, as well as assess what changes or improvements might be needed. To date, however, the committee has yet to hold a hearing or give consideration to the legislation.”

Clark also noted that Democrats “have been in control of the Senate, as well as Senate committees, since January 2021.” King, while an independent, caucuses with the Democrats.

Asked if he has talked to Collins about the bill, King said: “I don’t know if I’ve talked to her personally, but we’ve communicated with her office. There hasn’t been any interest in supporting it.”

The BUMP Act

Collins is the sole Republican co-sponsor of another effort to regulate guns, Heinrich’s BUMP Act, which bans so-called bump stocks. Bump stocks are devices that allow assault weapons to rapidly fire multiple rounds.

The U.S. Supreme Court in June reversed a Trump administration executive action that banned bump stocks. The federal government argued that bump stocks make semiautomatic weapons the equivalent of machine guns, which are forbidden by law for people to own. But the Supreme Court disagreed, ruling that bump stocks do not turn semiautomatic weapons into machine guns.

The BUMP Act, which King also co-sponsors, has also failed so far to get a committee hearing, and it was blocked procedurally from receiving a vote on the Senate floor this summer.

Republicans have traditionally been against restrictions on assault-style rifles or bump stocks, arguing that they infringe upon Second Amendment rights. Congress did pass a bipartisan assault weapons ban in 1994, but it expired in 2004 and efforts to revive it have failed despite numerous mass shootings in recent years in which the shooters were armed with the weapons.

Ronald Schmidt, a political science professor at the University of Southern Maine, said by focusing on the technical aspects of gun manufacturing, King and Heinrich attempted to defuse political opposition. But he said it’s a testament to how difficult gun legislation is to pass that the GOSAFE Act failed to gain traction.

“Sen. King should get kudos for an inventive attempt. He went to great lengths to try to get around the usual opposition to these types of bills,” Schmidt said. “It’s really depressing that it went nowhere.”

Staff Writer Eric Russell contributed to this report.