No federal assault weapons ban will pass
To hear the progressive voices in the media tell it, an assault weapons ban, such as proposed by Diane Feinstein, is all but certain next year. Political realities tell a different story. This ban is likely to pass the Senate on a nearly party-line vote, but it is unlikely to pass the Republican-controlled House. Since Sandy Hook, a total of two Congressional Republicans have signaled their willingness to even consider gun control measures. More telling, Lindsey Graham, Rand Paul and other conservative Republicans have come out in opposition. In fact, Boehner probably wont' even schedule the Feinstein bill for a vote.
It's not that the measure is unpopular, although PPP and Gallup disagree on its popularity. (NB: I don't buy that the Gallup poll is flawed. The responsible thing to do is to add it to the data set.) It's not even that the Tea Party is opposed to a ban; they don't have the numbers to stop it. The constituency that will hold the GOP accountable is hard-line Second Amendment advocates.
Since Sandy Hook, the rhetoric on both sides of the gun debate has been highly vitriolic, in parts mendacious, and often irrational. While many gun owners side with Feinstein, hundreds of thousands more have been told that they're the moral equivalent of serial killers. Their response, unsurprisingly, is, "fuck you." They are not in the mood to explain their actions to or negotiate with the anti-gun side. Their policy is zero tolerance. These are the same folks that contributed 88,000 signatures to a petition calling for Piers Morgan to be deported, Kleindienst v. Mandel style. The moment Feinstein's proposal hit the Internet, they got to work spreading the word and hitting the phones. It's virtually certain that any Republican that votes for this ban, or is seen as acting insufficiently to stop it, will face a primary challenge from both those gun owners and the Tea Party. I doubt any of them will risk it.
It's easy to conflate these people with the NRA. The surest sign that they are not the NRA, and not acting on behest of, or in agreement with, the NRA, is that they're not exactly enthusiastic about Wayne LaPierre's lame arm-the-teachers proposal either. This is a grass roots response, which the NRA did not instigate. Indeed, the NRA needs to get ahead of it, or risk seeming irrelevant compared to more strident groups such as Gun Owners of America or the Second Amendment Foundation.
Other new gun control measures are possible, provided they're quite modest. Closing the private transaction loophole - in other words, requiring all gun transactions to have a background check or to go through an FFL - is overwhelmingly popular at 92%, and strikes me as a good candidate for passage in 2013. Almost anything that places a prohibition on law-abiding citizens, including a ban on large magazines proposed by House Democrats, is going to run into a wall of opposition.
The flip side is that this is a short term situation that might last a few years. Continued hard line opposition, without a serious proposal to keep firearms out of the hands of deranged maniacs, will eventually lead to something along the lines of the Feinstein bill and from there to a blanket ban and confiscation. Second Amendment hard liners - not the NRA, but the SAF, GOA, JPFO, and the grass roots they represent - need to think carefully about what measures they will accept in order to keep guns out of the hands of people who cannot handle them responsibly. Yes, this is asking a lot.