To keep scoring legislative victories, the movement and its partisans have to pretend they never score any.
To keep scoring legislative victories, the movement and its partisans have to pretend they never score any.
I s the gun-control movement suffering from amnesia? The coverage of the Senate’s ongoing debate on guns once again makes me wonder.
In the Washington Post, Mike DeBonis casts the Murphy–Cornyn framework that the Senate is currently considering as an “inflection point” and a “a watershed moment” that might, per Senator Blumenthal of Connecticut, have the effect of “breaking the gun lobby’s grip on Congress.” Elsewhere, such language is de rigueur. Senator Schumer was quoted a few days ago as saying that he is “pleased that, for the first time in nearly 30 years, Congress is on the path to take meaningful action to address gun violence.” In USA Today, Senator Murphy hailed “a breakthrough agreement on gun violence — the first in 30 years — that will save lives.” At the BBC, Gabby Giffords was quoted as crowing that the measure will “be the first time in 30 years that Congress takes major action on gun safety.” And, in the Guardian, David Hogg is cited as being confident that he is watching “senators reach a bipartisan deal on guns for the first time in 30 years.”
On his personal website, Senator Murphy has expanded on this “30 years” idea, proposing that, if passed, the Murphy–Cornyn plan will break “the thirty year logjam on the issue of gun violence,” becoming “the most significant piece of anti-gun violence legislation in nearly 30 years.” But, surely, Murphy cannot have forgotten that, just five years ago, he and Senator Cornyn got together to write a different piece of “anti-gun violence legislation,” and that, when they announced that plan to the public, Murphy cast it in terms almost identical to those he is using today. The 2017 legislation, Murphy explained at the time, was “a big deal,” “a bipartisan breakthrough on gun legislation,” “an important milestone that shows real compromise can be made on the issue of guns,” and “the most important piece of bipartisan guns legislation since Manchin-Toomey.” In 2018, that “important” step was signed into law.
Today? It doesn’t exist. Indeed, when Chris Murphy looks back at the last 30 years, he sees no significant gun-law reforms after 1994. The “big deal” has become invisible. The “breakthrough” has become a blip. The “milestone” has been memory-holed.
To those who have been paying attention, this cycle is somewhat familiar. In Step One, the advocates of stricter gun-control laws convince Republicans to consider some new restrictions on the Second Amendment. In Step Two, the media and the Democratic Party cast the resulting negotiations as an unprecedented and long-awaited “breakthrough” that might yield the “first significant gun control legislation since 1994.” In Step Three, the bill passes and is signed into law. And, in Step Four, it is completely forgotten about the moment it seems politically feasible to restart the cycle.
Today, we’re witnessing Step Two.
This habit is not new, and it is by no means limited to Senator Murphy. In 2008, ABC News hailed the congressional response to the massacre at Virginia Tech as “the first major federal gun control measure in more than 13 years,” and suggested that, if it had been in effect, “it might have prevented” that attack. Today, that law has been conveniently forgotten — including by ABC itself. In a piece published last month, “Why gun control efforts in Congress have mostly failed for 30 years,” the outlet doesn’t even mention it in a long list of “notable pieces of federal gun legislation that either passed or were defeated in Congress.”
A similar tendency applies to coverage of the NRA, which is invariably cast both as the sole cause of American opposition to gun control and as a spent force that is finally on the verge of being vanquished. To listen to the American media — and to the activists that it promotes — one gets the impression that the NRA has opposed every piece of gun-control legislation that was proposed in the last three decades, and that the key to changing this is for the “reformers” to rack up a single, zeitgeist-changing win. But this isn’t true. The 2008 law that ABC called “the first major federal gun control measure in more than 13 years” was supported by the NRA, which explained at the time that it had “tried to get this done in federal legislation since the mid-90s.” The NRA also backed President Trump’s 2017 ban on bump stocks — yet another change that was lauded at the time as politically and legally significant, but that has now been forgotten in the interest of pretending that, if the latest legislative proposal can just make it over the finish line, the gun lobby’s supposedly unbroken streak of wins will finally come to an end.
Why does this happen? The answer is simple: It happens because the modern gun-control movement has no limiting principle governing its ambition, and because it is not as good at hiding this as it believes itself to be. Senator Murphy doesn’t really believe that the deals he has negotiated with John Cornyn are important; he thinks that they will help him get a little faster to where he truly wants to be, which is importing Australia’s gun laws into the United States. This being so, it is firmly in Senator Murphy’s interest to pretend that he has never before gotten his own way on the issue, lest Americans who are skeptical of the idea that “progress” means “more gun control” be uncouth enough to ask him whether the laws he has already spearheaded have actually done anything worthwhile.
From Murphy’s perspective, the relentless focus on the early 1990s is entirely understandable. Back then, within the space of two years, Congress enacted a sweeping federal background-check system and prohibited the sale of modern sporting rifles. If one had based one’s presumptions on other Western countries — Britain and Australia, say — one might have reasonably assumed that this was the opening stage of a gradual dismantling of the right to keep and bear arms. But that didn’t happen. Instead, Americans trebled the number of privately owned guns in circulation; pretty much every state liberalized its laws; concealed carry moved first to being allowed with a permit and then, in at least half the states, to being allowed without one; the 1994 prohibition on “assault weapons” expired and wasn’t renewed; the Supreme Court confirmed that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” means what it plainly says; and, amid these developments, crimes and murders committed with firearms were halved in every region of the country, for every demographic group.
All that’s been forgotten, too.