German Lopez makes a strong case (at Vox) that the mainstream Democratic approach to gun policy can’t achieve much. Background checks and bans on “assault weapons” would do little to reduce rates of gun homicide, suicide, and injury even at their most successful, because they would leave so many guns in Americans’ possession. Some people have drawn the conclusion that gun control in the U.S. is a blind alley. Lopez goes the other way: Progressives should set more ambitious goals. “Democrats should go big. They need to focus on the abundance of guns in the US and develop a suite of policies that directly tackle that issue, from licensing to confiscation to more aggressive bans of certain kinds of firearms (including, perhaps, all semiautomatic weapons or at least some types of handguns).”
Is this a plausible path? To Lopez’s credit, he lays out a lot of the evidence that it isn’t. He points to the rapid change in views about same-sex marriage as a hopeful precedent. But the issues just aren’t comparable. About twenty years passed between the time that most people had heard of the idea of same-sex marriage and its attainment of majority support. It triumphed nearly as soon as it became a live issue. Support for a ban on handguns, on the other hand, declined more or less continuously from 1959 through 2012 before very modestly rebounding.
Even when it comes to Democrats, Lopez understates what an uphill climb gun control has. He writes that “by and large, the party has remained in the same place it was in 25 years ago, focused on background checks and an assault weapons ban.” Both Democrats and Republicans have gotten less supportive of an assault-weapons ban over time. In 1993, 47 of the 56 Senate Democrats voted for it; in 2013, only 39 of the 55 Senate Democrats did. (I’m counting King and Sanders in the 55.) Over the same span, the Republican votes for the ban fell from nine to one.