National Review - October 30, 2017

16 | http://www.nationalreview.com OCTOBER 30 , 2017

explain why gun laws looked so unsatis-

factory to gun-controllers before 2008.

But a failure to explain obvious features

of the political landscape is not unique

to her theory.

Consider the last time the Senate

voted on assault weapons. It was in

2013, after the Sandy Hook massacre,

when Democrats controlled the cham-

ber. A bill to reinstate the ban that had

been in place from 1994 to 2004 got only

40 votes. Two of the noes came from the

Democratic senators of Colo rado, a state

that has a lower-than-average rural pop-

ulation and is not notorious for its shut-

tered factories. It wasn’t “gridlock,” in

any normal sense of the word, that beat

this legislation, and it would not take

gridlock to defeat the stronger version

Max Boot favors. It wasn’t the filibuster

or gerrymandering, either.

What none of these explanations

grapples with is a fact that politicians in

both parties know well: There are many

more intense, relatively single-minded

supporters of gun rights than opponents

of it. An elected official is much more

likely to lose office because he voted

for regulating guns than because he

voted against it.

Political commentators’ theories about

the fervor of gun-rights supporters are

not always well grounded. Cillizza

writes as though the possibility of a

slippery slope is a fantasy concocted by

the NRA. He ignores Barack Obama’s

lauding of Australia, which confiscated

guns, as an example of what sensible

policy can accomplish; Nancy Pelosi’s

recently expressed desire that small

restrictions lead to bigger ones; and all

of his fellow commentators who have

called for sweeping bans and confisca-

tions (including Boot).

But even if these explanations accu-

rately described the mindset of pro-gun

voters, they would leave out the other

side of the equation. What the commen-

tators generally don’t even try to explain

is why so few voters share their own pas-

sion for restricting guns. Why don’t they

act as though they believe our gun laws

are “literally killing us”?

Gallup has been polling Americans

about guns for years. It finds public

support for many regulations, and

sometimes broad support. “Universal

background checks” drew 86 percent

approval in its most recent test of the

issue. The public also believes that

E

VERYONEknew, after the mas-

sacre in Las Vegas, that gun

control was not going to get

anywhere. The public conver-

sation about guns hit the usual notes—

its very roteness is by now one of those

notes—but this time more of it fo -

cused on why gun control has such

poor prospects.

Much of the discussion centered on

just why gun control’s critics are so irra-

tional. CNN political analyst Chris

Cillizza said that the central reason for

congressional inaction on guns is that

supporters of gun rights believe, base-

lessly, that liberals are out to grab their

guns. Charles Sykes, a conservative dis-

affected by the rise of Donald Trump,

argued in the New York Timesthat the

National Rifle Association had made

the issue part of the culture wars.

David Brooks, in the same newspaper,

put the culture wars in an economic con-

text: Deindustrialization had made peo-

ple in rural and industrial parts of the

country feel their way of life is under

attack. If not for that, supporters would

be able to see that gun regulations “don’t

seriously impinge freedom”—as “re -

search” (astonishingly) shows. David

Frum told CNN viewers that racial and

sexual anxieties lay at the root of pro-

gun sentiment.

Many commentators noted that most

people want more regulation of guns,

and devised explanations for their in -

ability to achieve this goal. Max Boot

wrote in the Daily Beastthat Congress

should have vastly strengthened the ban

on assault weapons instead of letting it

lapse. Why hadn’t it? “Political grid-

lock is killing us. Literally.”

E. J. Dionne Jr., Norm Ornstein, and

Thomas Mann argued in the Washing -

ton Postthat anti-democratic features

of our government—including gerry-

mandering, the filibuster, and the

overrepresentation of rural areas in the

Senate—had thwarted the majority’s

preferences. Dahlia Lithwick offered a

convoluted explanation to Slatereaders:

The gun lobby had fooled the reasonable

majority into thinking that a 2008 Su -

preme Court decision had declaredall

gun regulation unconstitutional, even

though it had not.

Lithwick provided no evidence that

this misimpression is widespread, let

alone that it has the consequences she

asserted. It is a theory that does little to

Why Gun Control Loses

Motivated opponents, ambivalent supporters

BY RAMESH PONNURU

ROMANGENN

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