Following every national gun tragedy, Americans scratch their heads and say, “When are we going to do something about this?” This week, Democrats had an answer—we’re going to shut down the People’s House until the people get a bill. The 25-hour sit-in ushered in a post-Orlando shift on gun safety like we haven’t seen in a decade-plus.
Democrats finally leaned into the issue hard and as they did, Republicans turned out the lights and fled Washington, signaling a sea change on an issue that has dogged Democrats ever since Al Gore got shut out of the White House in 2000.
Does this mean that Congress will suddenly start passing background checks and bans on high-capacity magazines? No. It is, after all, controlled by Republicans, a wholly owned subsidiary of the National Rifle Association (NRA). But it does suggest that Democrats not only feel palpable urgency on the issue, they now see it as a net-positive for them at the polls. Likewise, the fact that Republicans got the heck outta Dodge is confirmation that they know getting too much exposure on the fight will not play to their favor.
That’s a distinct change in thinking on Capitol Hill even if it won’t result in immediate action. “Gun rights” more broadly—which a majority of Americans typically favor when asked—have been viewed as a winner for Republicans even though the vast majority of voters support distinct gun measures like background checks and “no fly, no buy.”
When asked about specific policy steps, 92 percent of respondents favored expanded background checks, 87 percent supported prohibiting convicted felons or people with mental health problems from buying guns and 85 percent were in support of banning people on the terror watch list or on the no-fly list from buying guns.
Even the NRA knows it can’t win on the specifics, which is why they talk incessantly about “taking away” rights and the threat of terrorist groups like ISIS and the Islamic State. Go to their web page of ads and you won’t hear anything about loosening background checks or the necessity of owning assault weapons, instead you’ll see a former Navy seal shooting a handgun while warning about the “threat of lone wolf attacks," or you’ll hear a Mom talking about defending her kids.
This is a sign of the NRA’s weakness—it can’t talk about issue specifics because the American public isn’t with them. It doesn’t sell. So instead they sell “terrorist threats” and Second Amendment Rights, which brings us to another point.
Let’s remember that the week began with the Supreme Court rejecting legal challenges to assault weapon bans in Connecticut and New York. The denial affirmed the view of the court that both the state and federal government can indeed regulate firearms, including bans on certain weapons.
If ever there were a time to start a push for assault weapon bans, now is it in the wake of Orlando and the Supreme Court action. But just as sure as I’m sitting here, some small thinkers in Washington are already saying, “Don’t go for an assault weapons ban, it’s too much, too soon.” That’s exactly why it makes sense to push for the bans in the states. In fact, pushing pro-safety measures at the state level has been a very effective and, perhaps, underused tactic on gun issues—a point I made in a piece earlier this week titled, “Lawmakers may not vote for gun safety but voters usually do.”
A number of commenters on the piece noted that it wasn’t true—that voters routinely elect lawmakers who are bad on gun safety. True enough, though I was trying to expose the disconnect between constituents and their lawmakers, who are clearly more beholden to the NRA than to voters. But to the commenters’ point, voters have to start prioritizing gun safety if they want to see meaningful change on the issue. Start asking your lawmakers about it and which way they would vote on certain bills. Get them on the record, if possible, and make sure they know it’s important to you. And finally, become single-issue voters on the matter. If people really want their legislators to vote the way they themselves would vote on guns at the ballot box, then they’ll have to vote for or against their representatives based on that singular issue.
The fact of the matter is, vote counts on Capitol Hill won’t change until several lawmakers in swing states/districts lose their seats over their lack of support or bad votes on gun safety.
Nonetheless, the conventional wisdom on the Hill that guns are a better issue for the GOP and a wedge for Democrats began to crumble this week. And believe it or not, conventional wisdom is more powerful in Washington than public opinion itself—issues live and die in the Beltway based on group think.
The shift marks an opening that stands to shed more light on the myth that the NRA is invincible. The group can, in fact, be dismantled one initiative at time, and enacting meaningful gun safety measures in the states can eventually lead to action on Capitol Hill.