Gun control may have cemented a place in the 2016 elections this week after two aspiring young journalists who worked at a Roanoke, Virginia, TV station were shot on live television. The graphic killings came just over two months after nine black church worshippers were shot to death in Charleston, South Carolina.
Hillary Clinton, who had begun to push the issue before the Virginia shooting, seized on it again in Cleveland Thursday.
"I know when it comes to gun violence ... a lot of people just basically say, 'You know, it's just too hard, we're not going to try this again.' Well, I am going to tell you, I am going to keep going. I am not giving up. I am not going to sit by while more good people die, and they get 24 or 48 or 72 hours of TV coverage and then we all just say, 'Well, there's nothing we can do' – until the next time people are murdered by gun violence."
Donald Trump
summed up the Republican refrain:
This isn’t a gun problem. This is a mental problem,” he said. “That’s what they should be focusing on instead of guns -- they should be talking about mental health because there’s so many things that can be done.”
I'm glad to see Republicans suddenly worried about mental health issues and eagerly anticipate their proposals for increased funding to address the issue.
In the meantime, let’s go below the fold and get back to a reality-based discussion about what, if anything, can be done to enact meaningful gun-safety measures.
It’s worth noting that Clinton’s embrace of the issue marks a distinct turning point for Democrats, basically since Al Gore lost the 2000 election. The conventional wisdom (CW) in Washington held that Gore lost his race against pro-guns George W. Bush because he had gone too far to the left on gun control during his primary fight against his more liberal challenger Bill Bradley. (Many things can be said about this over-simplified explanation but when a candidate loses his home state, Tennessee, it's not because of any one issue, it's because he was a flawed candidate. If you want a primer that offers an alternative perspective on how the gun issue really played out in 2000, check this out. Toward the end, you will note that gun control advocates had recently scored major wins on ballot measures in Florida and Missouri leading up to 2000, contrary to the conventional wisdom that gun safety was a losing issue.)
In any case, Democrats have basically dropped gun control like a hot potato in every presidential race since, including 2008 and 2012. Though President Obama did feature the issue in his 2013 State of the Union address in the wake of the horrific Newtown shootings.
So the fact that Hillary Clinton is pushing the issue and pledging to do something on it should she become president is a notable and positive sign. If Clinton is the Democratic establishment candidate—as most people currently perceive her to be—then the Democratic establishment has shifted left.
But that says nothing of what’s possible in the Beltway, where CW rules the day and the NRA has been viewed as a political undertaker for a decade-plus. It’s a particularly frustrating phenomenon when you consider that nearly nine in 10 Americans support stronger background checks and yet we watched a 2013 background check measure fall six votes short of advancing in the Senate just several months after Newtown.
In order to flip that equation—where lawmakers are actually more beholden to public opinion than the gun lobby—two things have to happen: 1) lawmakers have to start viewing the NRA with less fear; 2) lawmakers have to believe there’s a political downside to not supporting gun safety measures.
There is some cause for optimism in recent years on the first count, though a bit less on the second.
Here’s a look at the 2012 election from an unpublished Center for American Progress Memo authored by CAP Senior VP Arkadi Gerney in 2014:
In the 2012 election, just six weeks before Newtown, the results of Independence USA’s $8 million spending compared well against more than $20 million in spending by the NRA that cycle. Independence USA PAC (I-USA) knocked out pro-gun Democratic congressman Joe Baca (CA) – a remarkable result that would have been very unexpected a month earlier and one that was widely noticed among Capitol Hill Democrats. Meanwhile, the Sunlight Foundation concluded that no political group had a worse return on their investment in 2012 than the NRA, which spent just 1% of its political money on behalf of winning candidates.
And following the 2014 midterms, the
New Republic published an
instructive article detailing the electoral wins for gun safety advocates. Among them:
Look at which two Democrats were among the few to survive the midterm debacle: Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper and Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy, both top targets of the NRA for their having signed into law comprehensive gun-law reforms following the Newtown, Conn. massacre. Both governors got major financial support from Independence USA, the SuperPAC set up by Bloomberg to support candidates who favor tightening gun laws, as well as other candidates who fit Bloomberg’s definition of pragmatic centrism. And both also got strong grassroots backing from the groups that sprang up after the Newtown killings.
Additionally, the seats of two Colorado state lawmakers who had lost a 2013 recall election due to their support for gun safety measures
were reclaimed in 2014 by Democrats who favor gun reforms.
Gun safety advocates also went straight to the voters in Washington State in 2014 with an expanded background check measure and won big.
It’s true that NRA-backed candidates did much better in 2014 than 2012, but that wasn’t so much due to their stances on gun rights as to the sweeping nature of the election. Here’s CAP’s Gerney again:
In a wave year for Republicans, about 90% of the NRA’s $31 million in federal independent expenditures supported winning candidates. […] While some observers outside of right-wing media have allowed that the NRA’s spending contributed to the outcomes, few have concluded that guns played a major role in those races.
So in truth, the NRA—as feared as it is on the Hill—has had less electoral success directly related to the gun issue over the last several election cycles. In 2012, in fact, their candidates performed poorly by and large.
What gun safety advocates are missing so far is the ability to make candidates pay for voting the wrong way. Democratic Rep. Baca, as noted above, was a big take-out that was "widely noticed by Democrats," and that's a start.
If there’s one thing I know from reporting on the LGBT movement, it’s that lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have to fear you. And often times that means gun safety advocates will have to go after Democrats until they prove a point. Then they’ll need just enough Republicans in moderate districts who begin to fear being on the wrong side of gun safety.
While public opinion isn’t always enough to sway an issue on Capitol Hill, it is the beginning of the end. The NRA can only hold back that tide for so long and the most recent elections suggest its days are numbered.