Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

Book Preview: #1 I see a broken man when I think about my time in the Senate. I was standing in the inner office of the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, who had led the charge to pass universal background checks. But four months earlier, his six-year-old son had been shot dead in his first-grade classroom.

#2 The support of a broad, bipartisan majority of senators and the American public was not enough to pass the background-checks bill. Its opponents used a twentieth-century rule that was invented to curtail obstruction by ending the type of marathon filibusters that many people picture when they think of the Senate.

#3 The vote deciding the bill's fate had taken place shortly before we found ourselves in Reid's office, standing around in silence. As reporters filed their stories in the press gallery one floor above, we waited for Neil to speak.

#4 The republic, not a democracy argument is based on a semantic twist. When the Framers wrote the Constitution, the word democracy meant direct democracy, which was the kind practiced in ancient Greece.