The Hill reports:

Gun-control advocates have high hopes for Hillary Clinton’s presidential run, viewing her as an ally who can finish the push for tightened background checks that has stalled in President Obama’s second term.
Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, has been a staunch advocate of gun-control proposals, such as expanding background checks and banning assault weapons. Last summer, she ripped groups that oppose those ideas as out of step with public opinion.
“We cannot let a minority of people, and that’s what it is, it is a minority of people, hold a view point that terrorizes the majority of people,” Clinton said during a CNN town-hall event.
The remark was music to the ears of gun-control groups, who want her to bring that same rhetoric to the campaign trail.

I should perhaps start by stating the obvious: Hillary Clinton would be smart to ignore these groups. As her own husband knows all too well, gun control is a touchy subject, and it is increasingly a political loser. Per Pew, Americans are more strongly in favor of gun rights than they have been for decades. Presumably, she does not want to be Al Gore.

That to one side, what really jumped out at me was this line: “Gun-control advocates have high hopes for Hillary Clinton’s presidential run, viewing her as an ally who can finish the push for tightened background checks that has stalled in President Obama’s second term.”

One has to ask “why?” The primary federal problem for the gun control movement of late has not been President Obama, it has been Congress. After Sandy Hook, Obama fought extremely hard for the failed Toomey-Manchin bill, which would have imposed background checks on all private sales, and he signaled his willingness to sign a new “assault weapons” ban and/or to agree to a federal limit on the size of magazines. Sadly for him, he never got that chance. Why? Well, because the relatively pro-gun Harry Reid blocked everything but background checks, a coalition of Democrats and Republicans in the Senate refused flatly to acquiesce even to that. (Had they done so, moreover, the measure would have been dead on arrival in the House.)

Since that time, Congress has become more, not less, Republican; it has become more, not less, conservative; and it has become more, not less, pro-Second Amendment. It is true that Hillary may well be the next president. Indeed, I think she’s probably the favorite. But she is unlikely to enjoy a Democratic House or a Democratic Senate; and if, somehow, she does enjoy those things, it will be because a good number of more moderate Democrats have been put back into the legislature. That being so, why on earth would anybody think that she will magically be able to do what President Obama could not? Can they honestly believe that American politics is an episode of the West Wing?