Rep. Peter King (R-NY) sums up the current situation regarding gun control.
Representative Peter T. King, a New York Republican who favors a federal ban on the type of assault weapon used in the shooting in Aurora, Colo., in which 12 people died and 58 were wounded, said even lesser gun control measures had no future in Congress.
“The political reality is at this point the American people have made the decision that gun control is ineffective, that people have the right to have weapons, and the government can’t be trusted and they’d rather trust themselves with a gun,” Mr. King said.
Beyond that, control of the Senate will hinge on the results of elections in places like Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Montana, Nebraska, and North Dakota. The Democrats’ hopes of taking over the House of Representatives will be dashed if they can’t win over a couple dozen suburban/exurban districts that are, at best, mixed on the issue of gun control and in which gun advocates have more passion.
Nothing can be done to frontally restrict access to guns right now, nor would it be politically advisable to pretend otherwise.
Don’t believe me? Check this out.
Conservative pundit Bill Kristol bucked the party line on “Fox News Sunday,” though. After host Chris Wallace pointed out that there has been declining support from the public for gun control, he said he was a “squish” on the issue, and thought the Democrats should push it more.
“People have a right to handguns and hunting rifles,” he said. “I don’t think they have a right to semi-automatic, quasi-machine guns that can shoot hundred bullets at a time. And I actually think the Democrats are being foolish as they are being cowardly. I think there is more support for some moderate forms of gun control.
Another panelist said, “Good luck with that, Bill.”
Bill Kristol doesn’t have a sincere bone in his body. He’s just trying to push the Democrats into a trap.
The Democrats should also stop having all their talking heads that go on television to discuss gun control hail from liberal enclaves. What do Jon Tester, Claire McCaskill, and Martin Heinrich think should be done to prevent massacres? They’re the ones whose election or defeat will actually matter, and they’re the ones who would have to support any gun control bill if it were actually going to pass.
Gun control advocates must come to grips with the fact that support for their position is at an all-time low, and the makeup of Congress, which skews power to rural populations and small states, makes what small amount of support that remains almost totally irrelevant. At best, that support serves as a convenient fundraising mechanism for the GOP.
Don’t blame political leaders for not showing more leadership on the issue. If you want gun restrictions, you first must convince the people of this country that you are right. The politicians will follow the people. Bill Kristol understands that. So should you.
From your mouth to God’s ear.
Not really. The reason gun control support isn’t a big issue (it’s not that people actively oppose it – they just aren’t thinking about it) is that gun ownership is at an all time low and crime rates (with the exception of mass shootings) have plummeted. Only a third of Americans report owning a gun today, whereas almost half had one 30 years ago.
Quite simply, America is safe enough now – probably in part due to the low ownership of guns, something the media seems to be unaware of – that they are willing to tolerate the gun nuts in the short term.
If we start to see rising crime rates again, you’ll see that dynamic shift – and low gun ownership rates might mean a majority in favor of controlling the minority who choose to build their own personal arsenals.
here’s the numbers gun advocates don’t seem to like to talk about:
http://leanforward.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/24/12926630-gun-ownership-on-the-decline-but-just-as-
many-guns-as-ever?lite
Note that although the NUMBER of guns is astoundingly high, the actual number of people who own guns is very low. So we have a small percentage of the population that seems to be addicted to firearms while everyone else has moved on with their lives.
That’s an interesting chart in the link you provided. Suppose–just for argument’s sake–that the number of households with guns hasn’t gone down that much but that people have become less likely to admit to gun ownership when they are surveyed. Follow my logic on this: If you are buying guns in the delusional belief that you can use them to defend yourself from government oppression then you aren’t going to tell someone who calls you on the phone. Ever paranoid, you would suspect they were making a list of who to come and visit when the long awaited iron fist comes out of the velvet glove.
I am not disputing the very real fact that the gun owners I personally know have multiple weapons. A lot of them even have excessive amounts of weaponry and ammo. I’m only suggesting the downward trend might be a reporting error rather than based on actual fact. I would like to believe fewer households have guns. But I suspect the decline is less radical than a voluntary survey reveals.
I’ve seen people challenge this survey on that logic, but it seems like a weak challenge. I know a lot of people who own guns, and they love shouting that fact from the rooftops. In our culture, gun ownership is a status symbol, sort of like owning a BMW.
Truly paranoid people who actually believe the government is coming after them are actually quite rare. That’s why paranoid personality disorders are considered a form of mental illness. We do see these people more often on the internet, so we might think their viewpoint is common – but it’s not.
The survey in question is one of the very few that has taken place every year for many, many years, and it is not focused entirely on guns or sponsored by a gun-related advocacy group. Unless you can provide real evidence that Americans are lying in spectacular numbers and the survey authors are desperately trying to cover that up, I think it has to be taken seriously.
But support for gun control was much higher in the low-crime 1950s.
Sources? More detailed argument? Apples to apples?
Sources? OK; I was unaware that this information was not widely known. OK, homicide rates back to 1950 here: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0873729.html
And a nice Gallup chart on support for handgun bans here: http://www.gallup.com/poll/150341/record-low-favor-handgun-ban.aspx
More detailed argument: OK, you’re wrong that lower crime rates leads to more support for gun control. The two are not correlated.
Apples to apples? I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do with that.
Meanwhile, one very bad day in Iraq was the equivalent of 100 “Auroras.” Not that such violence has anything to do with the US “liberating” that country.
I agree completely, Booman. It is sad beyond measure that this is where we find ourselves in 2012.
The bottom line is the political reality of the moment. To be truly FOR gun control, in either the short or the long term, the reelection of Obama is the best realistic option. To make that reelection come to pass, and to have a chance of retaking the House and possibly hold the Senate, it is essential that we don’t wade into this debate until after the election. To take on the issue at this time would cost votes and seats, pure and simple. Is that the way things should be? Of course not, but that’s reality.
Democrats have been very badly outmaneuvered for many, many years by the NRA and by Republicans in the language surrounding gun control. You can’t change that in the near term, and we can’t afford to hand this gift-wrapped issue to Romney and the Republicans.
In addition to Kristol, I also think Mayor Bloomberg was being somewhat disingenuous in his seemingly valiant statements in the wake of the Aurora shootings. He is positioning himself for a potential Presidential run in four years, when the climate is likely to be better on this issue, and he pays no political price whatsoever for speaking as the mayor of NYC (see Josh Marshall’s recent discussion about just how very blue New York State has become of late, even upstate).
Obama has been very disciplined about holding his fire on many issues of great importance to progressives. In my opinion, his very survival in office has depended just as much on what he hasn’t done, and when he hasn’t done it, as it has on how and when he’s chosen to act or speak up (he got political benefits from his non-legislative dream act maneuver and spoke out on gay marriage in a way and at a time when it did relatively little political damage). Of course it’s political–job one (to save the country) is for him to get reelected.
And today in Aurora, there lies a young man who was shot in the eye, and he is in an induced coma while his pregnant wife is down the hallway being induced.
He has no health insurance. The family estimates the medical bills will top $2 million.
Gun control? Be nice to send the bill to the NRA.
Something that became clear to me thanks to climate change is this:
This is true. It’s also backwards.
Support went down because Dems abandoned it as an issue and stopped talking about it. This means only one side ever gets the information out and so the public is educated in one direction. If you want support for gun control to rise, if you want to convince the people first, you have to advocate it.
Yes and no.
You have to determine who “you” is.
If you mean that gun control advocates need to meet with politicians and try to work with them to make progress, then you are correct.
If you mean that President Obama and Jon Tester will advance gun control by talking about it, you are almost certainly wrong. In fact, allowing the Democratic Party to be branded as the party of gun control is doing the GOP’s work for it.
As for climate change, you have forgotten about it, but the House passed a Cap and Trade bill. They didn’t ignore it.
What changed is that the Mighty Right-Wing Wurlitizer cranked up a climate change-denial song and the choir started singing along.
I haven’t forgotten about it, don’t think I did.
Yes it was passed. Yes the rightist money went to work, but progressives stopped talking about it figuring Obama would do the rest. But even when it failed we (and by this I mean individuals, NGEs and office holders) should have continued to sound the alarm over the issue.
in more ways than hard projectile use or the projectile vomiting of rhetoric we always see in defense of them.
Imagine what actions would be taken if the ruling class and their mouthpieces — the pols and pundits — or even their enforcers like the police were to become victims of senseless and wanton gun violence?
I’d say the reaction would be similar to what would happen if the chicken hawks couldn’t get deferrments for themselves or their kids in times of needless wars. In both cases they are being subservient to the merchants of death through the gun lobby/NRA and the military industrial complex respectively, and so much so in the latter case, the repubs finally decided they’d finally abandon their notion that gov spending doesn’t create jobs.
The reality is, the lack of them (pols, pundits, their masters, etc) paying any personal price for conditions has a role across a broad swath of the American experience. For example, as long as they don’t have to struggle for life or quality of life things like food, health care, etc, there’s no incentive to find any meaningful remedies to the lack of social mobility or the inequalities that escalates and perpetuates.
I suppose this naturally follows from living under a type of capitalism that is incompatible with democracy, and which is based on one of the seven deadly sins known as greed.
Welcome to the Brave and New World with an unspeakable caste system full of castaways. Where do you fit in the pecking order? I think I’ll take an afternoon off from consumption, and contemplate my individual plight, and the artistry with which our masters have woven the thoughts of Huxley and Orwell into a tapestry of deceit that is invisible to the modern “rugged individualist”.
I feel like maybe a better way to talk about this issue is to ask why Republicans want to make it so much harder to vote than it is to buy a gun? Was voter fraud ever instrumental to mass murder in America? I mean, isn’t voting supposed to be our most important guarantor of freedom? Why are Republican governors rushing to pre-emptively screen large numbers of voters? Maybe we should really re-think a world where you have to make sure you’re on a list to vote but you can buy a gun anywhere you like no questions asked.
Why do they get to say that the solution for the yearly murder of 10,000 is more guns but the problem for a non-existent and imaginary voting fraud problem is less voting?
Not helpful was all the fear mongering after 9/11. The garbage that Republicans have been spewing about Obama hasn’t helped either.
Boo:
You are wrong. And you know who proves it, of all people? Frank Luntz!!!!!!