As the media covered the shooting at Oregon's Umpqua Community College last week, reporters and news anchors continually and almost helplessly asked if anything could be done to curb gun violence in America—the most
gun-laden nation in the world. Many sadly concluded, no, the gun lobby is too powerful, and if the tragic slaughter of elementary school kids in Newtown several years ago couldn't do it, then what could?
What that question fails to understand is that change doesn't come because of a moment, it comes because of a movement. And while a single event can become a galvanizing turning point, it takes many, many moments to create a movement.
This week, however, we started to see evidence of the seedlings of a movement beginning to take root. First, Hillary Clinton introduced a series of gun safety proposals and, if elected president, promised to take executive action if Congress failed to do so. Her main goals were closing loopholes on background checks in a variety of ways, prohibiting domestic abusers from accessing firearms, criminalizing the sale of guns by an individual to a violent felon, strengthening laws that prohibit sales to people with a mental illness, and repealing a federal statute that grants legal immunity to gun manufacturers and dealers for crimes committed with their guns.
Clinton has been championing gun control measures since this summer—a move that put her at odds with Democratic establishment thinking for a decade-plus. But even Capitol Hill Democrats, who have basically left the issue for dead since DC conventional wisdom tagged gun safety with Al Gore's loss in 2000, are starting to smell a winning issue.
Head below the fold for more.
Democrats on Thursday will begin a new push for gun control legislation in the Senate and plan to block other bills until their measures get a vote, Senate Democrats said.
The package, which has little chance of passage in the Republican-controlled chamber, will include a version of an earlier proposal to expand background checks. The expansion would include online firearms purchases and those from unlicensed dealers at gun shows.
Democrats are also mindful of trying to put Republicans, especially those running for re-election in swing states in 2016, on record as opposing the measures.
Democrats want to record the votes because they know it will work in their favor at the polls. Ron Brownstein explains why they suddenly see daylight where they once only saw darkness—
the changing electorate:
In a Pew Research Center poll in July, the voters most likely to put gun rights ahead of controlling access were white men and women without a college education. Those voters are shrinking within the overall electorate, and, as they tilt more toward Republicans, they are receding even faster within the Democratic coalition. Whites who didn’t finish college provided about half of Bill Clinton’s votes in 1992 but only about two-fifths of Gore’s in 2000 and a fourth of Obama’s in 2012.
Even President Obama, who suffered a humiliating defeat in 2013 with his legislative push to expand background checks, is now
revisiting the idea of trying to push the issue via executive order.
But the president did perhaps the most he could possibly do to help the gun safety movement last week when he explained to the nation what it would take to change the behavior of Capitol Hill lawmakers:
“Here’s what you need to do: You have to make sure that anybody that you are voting for is on the right side of this issue,” Obama said. If politicians oppose gun safety measures, he continued, “Even if they’re great on other stuff, you’ve got to vote against them.”
Making lawmakers believe that they will pay a price at the polls come Election Day unless they vote the right way on gun safety measures is the only way to change the nation’s virtual stagnation on exacting gun laws since the ‘90s.
The fact that Clinton and congressional Democrats are seizing on the issue is a reflection of their realization that public opinion and perhaps even the energy are there to actually galvanize voters on gun control. That will surely help Democrats at the polls, but it could also produce a movement for gun safety that finally equals the passion of gun rights advocates.
