"It wasn't so long ago that Harry Reid and Wayne LaPierre, the National Rifle Association CEO, looked like a wizened, cordial couple as they celebrated the grand opening of a Las Vegas shooting range—the summer of 2009, in fact. But just a year later the NRA, despite its "B" rating of the Senate majority leader, declined to endorse him in a hard-fought race against Republican Sharron Angle. So when Reid prepared last month to introduce background-check legislation opposed by the NRA, the New York Times dutifully noted their breakup.

It has not been amicable. Reid has set a hard deadline for the bill's sole Republican collaborator, Pennsylvania's Pat Toomey, to contribute compromise language or to take a walk. After thirteen conservatives sent a letter to Reid threatening to filibuster the legislation, he stood on the Senate floor Tuesday and recalled how his father's suicide—he shot himself in 1972—inspired him to write a Nevada state law requiring waiting periods to buy handguns.

But who officially ended things? Jon Ralston, a longtime Nevada political forecaster, says the senator did. "Reid is trying to do what he's always done—put all these political calculations into a cauldron, and cook up something that's pleasing to as many members of his caucus as possible." That's no small challenge for a pro-gun politician in a pro-gun state who, as Senate majority leader, has to worry about at least five colleagues facing reelection next year in red states. But neither is the challenge insurmountable. "There is a reason that a guy who's not the most charismatic guy in the world when you hear him talk, who doesn't represent the prototypical leader of a House of Congress, has stuck around for so long," Ralston said.

Mark Blaze, of Michael Bloomberg's Mayors Against Illegal Guns, has been lobbying Senate leadership on this issue for five years. All that time, he said, Reid and his cohort understood that the NRA was not the electoral decider it purported to be. What changed was Democrats' willingness to bet on that. "And Reid is no more to blame for that than any other member of Congress, or the public," Blaze said. "Now, when 90 percent of the public and 74 percent of NRA members think that everybody should get a background check before purchasing a gun, the percent of people who are on the other side is about the same number of Americans who believe Elvis is still alive."

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/nra-democrats-team-up-to-pass-gun-bill/

After 52 years in Congress, John Dingell knows it sometimes takes a "rather curious alliance," such as between the National Rifle Association and the House's most fervent gun control advocate, to move legislation.

That's what took place Wednesday when the House, by voice vote, passed a gun control bill that Rep. Dingell, D-Mich., helped broker between the NRA and Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y.

With the NRA on board, the bill, which fixes flaws in the national gun background check system that allowed the Virginia Tech shooter to buy guns despite his mental health problems, has a good chance of becoming the first major gun control law in more than a decade.

"We'll work with anyone, if you protect the rights of law-abiding people under the second amendment and you target people that shouldn't have guns," NRA chief Wayne LaPierre told CBS News Correspondent Sharyl Atkisson