For the past decade, advocates of gun control have sounded a note of despair. Massacres of children, such as the recent attack at a Nashville grade school, have not led to new laws to get guns off the streets. Polls showing strong public support for tighter regulations have not softened Republican opposition. Relabeling gun control as “gun safety” has done nothing.
One reason nothing has changed: Supporters of gun control keep misunderstanding why they fail. They keep asking why a large minority of people passionately oppose gun control, and not why so few people in the public-opinion majority mobilize to support it.
The opponents win, they think, because of undemocratic features of our government, such as the filibuster. Or they blame campaign contributions from the National Rifle Association. Or the Supreme Court’s rulings that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own guns. Or the paranoid fervor of some Republicans.
Many of these explanations have the air of excuses. The justices have, for example, so far erected no obstacles to a ban on guns that opponents call “assault weapons.” Yet even many blue states don’t have such bans. One just failed in Colorado, a state where Democrats hold the governorship and both legislative chambers. The last time the idea got a vote in the U.S. Senate — in 2013, when the Democrats had a majority — it lost 60-40. No filibuster was needed.