For a look at what is possible in the grinding politics of guns, consider abortion. It hasn’t been a full year since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, yet reproductive rights has influenced elections from Kansas to Wisconsin, with generally painful outcomes for Republicans. Politico, the racing news of US politics, noted that after the 2022 ruling, abortion quickly evolved from a roughly 50/50 issue, with neither party enjoying a great advantage nationally, to “Republican quicksand.”
Abortion politics shifted when a partisan minority began imposing extreme and unpopular positions on millions of Americans who reject absolutism on a complex issue. That’s a fair description of gun politics today. Like abortion, gun regulation has often been perilous terrain for Democrats. But it’s now an area that they have the potential to dominate. They should commandeer another issue traditionally identified with the GOP — crime — to help them do it.
Republicans have spent a decade or more adopting gun-crazy laws in states across the country. Since just 2021, 11 GOP-led states have passed permitless carry, enabling essentially any adult to carry a loaded semiautomatic firearm without a permit, training, character references or rudimentary oversight of any kind. In some states, a man convicted of reckless driving can legally walk into a bar carrying a loaded gun.
Meantime, the Supreme Court has been recasting American history and law in the image of the National Rifle Association while making it more difficult for blue states and cities to opt out of the GOP guns-everywhere-for-everyone regime.
This is an unpopular agenda. In a CNN survey taken last month, 64% of US adults favored “stricter gun control laws.” In a 2021 Pew Research Center poll, 53% said gun laws should be “more strict.” A poll last summer by the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found Americans backed a ban on the sale of AR-15s and similar semiautomatic rifles by 59% to 27%. Support in the poll for permitless carry, the GOP craze of the hour, was 29%.
“America has large state variation in attitudes toward guns and their utility,” Duke University political scientist Kristin Goss emailed. “In the red states, it seems, a vocal minority that wants looser [concealed carry] laws has been winning the day, abetted by a majority that doesn’t care enough about the issue and/or isn’t organized well enough to vocally oppose these measures.”
Gun violence, including murder and suicide, has been on the rise. According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have already been more than 17,600 deaths from gun violence in the US so far this year, and more than 14,000 firearm injuries.
Neither the gun industry nor its allied political party have abandoned the proposition that guns possess a mystical power to make society safer and more “polite.” But reality is getting awfully hard to deny: The most violent states in America are those warped by gun culture and governed by Republican gun laws. The prevalence of guns explains why the US is such an extreme outlier on gun violence to begin with.
While fear of crime remains a GOP electoral asset, the party of Donald Trump and Jan. 6 has become an increasingly absurd source of hosannas to “law and order.”
Democrats should seize the opening, framing the pursuit of sensible gun control as a means of combatting crime. The relentless waves of mass shootings, often by perpetrators who were obviously unfit to be anywhere near a gun, underscores the consequences of easy access to killing machines.
There will always be a strong strain of crazy in American gun politics. The fringe has had its way for a long time. But thanks to an increase in research, there have never been so many damning facts about the costs of an unchecked, radical gun culture backed by a major political party.
The sooner gun safety becomes a primary voting issue, especially for swing voters, the sooner we can stop discussing bullet-resistant school backpacks and other manifestations of gun pathology and begin to curtail America’s unique problem.
Republicans have embraced extremist policies that lead to violence. It’s up to Democratic political leaders to drive that point home and activate the emerging majority for gun safety.
More From Bloomberg Opinion:
- Podcast: Sandy Hook and a Reckoning for Gunmakers: Timothy O'Brien
- Save Your Outrage Over Ja Morant: Francis Wilkinson
- The Second Amendment Allows a Ban on the AR-15: Noah Feldman
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Francis Wilkinson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. politics and policy. Previously, he was an editor for the Week, a writer for Rolling Stone, a communications consultant and a political media strategist.
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.
