Guns are not a winning issue for Democrats

Gun control is back on the national agenda. While the killings in Georgia two weeks ago mostly prompted dialogue about motives and anti-Asian hate crimes, the murder of 10 last week in Colorado led President Joe Biden to urge Congress not “to wait another minute” before acting on gun regulation proposals, including a ban on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines.
The urgency is understandable. But from a political standpoint, Democrats would be better off focusing on parts of their agenda that have more realistic prospects of success. It’s not just that the odds are low for passing even modest gun-control legislation. It’s that the kinds of measures that are politically feasible would have little effect without policing reform, while those that would save large numbers of lives are politically toxic.
For eight years, between John Kerry’s defeat in 2004 and Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012, progressive leaders were pretty successful in keeping the gun-regulation issue off the national agenda. When he was head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and later the House Democratic Caucus, then-Representative Rahm Emanuel recruited many explicitly pro-gun candidates to run in tough House districts in 2006 and 2008 — and many of them won.
Democrats with safer seats didn’t stop believing in gun control, but they didn’t push it either. Liberal state legislatures were free to continue enacting gun rules, which many of them did. But after watching first Al Gore and then Kerry go down to defeat, party leaders decided that they no longer wanted to lose elections over an issue that is deeply important to conservative gun owners but that progressives regard as less pressing than health care, climate change, immigration and other matters.
Then came the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.
This was not only a horrific tragedy on its own terms, with a gunman killing 20 schoolchildren and six adults. It also occurred a month after Obama was soundly re-elected despite a fairly weak economy. Cultural liberalism appeared to be ascendant, and many of Emanuel’s gun-toting House members had lost in the 2010 midterms and weren’t around to object.
Obama, meanwhile, no longer needed to worry about re-election. After the shooting, he asked Congress “to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of politics,” and vowed to make gun regulation “a central issue.”
What emerged from all this was bipartisan legislation to require universal background checks.
That legislation failed in the Senate. But it created a predictable template: Every mass shooting, especially if it was in the suburbs, would generate a surge in media coverage, followed by somber proclamations by Democratic politicians that Something Must Be Done.
It is true, of course, that the large number of guns per capita in the US is related to all manner of social ills. They include a sky-high rate of gun suicides, a very high homicide rate compared to other rich countries, and the endemic problem of police shootings of civilians (which is at least in part a consequence of officers operating in an unusually gun-saturated environment).
But a background-check bill like the one proposed after Sandy Hook, which represents the outer limits of the politically possible, wouldn’t directly address any of these problems. The killer in Sandy Hook, for example, used a weapon owned legally by his mother and wouldn’t have been impeded by any background checks. And Colorado, the site of last week’s mass shooting, already has a law requiring universal background checks.
Yes, the latest version of the assault weapons ban, as introduced in Congress, would have banned the AR-556 that was used in the Boulder shooting. But popular support for a ban is fragile.
Biden was wide of the mark with his confident proclamation during the Democratic primaries that “over 90% of the American people think we have to get assault weapons off the street.”

—Bloomberg

Matthew Yglesias writes the Slow Boring blog and newsletter. A co-founder of Vox and a former columnist for Slate, he is also host of “The Weeds” podcast and is the author, most recently, of “One Billion Americans”