What more can be said about mass shootings in America? We who find ourselves outraged anew by each fresh massacre have settled into a routine. There’s now a canon of essays and satirical pieces to share on social media; in conversations online and off, we offer familiar rebuttals to familiar Republican diversions and deflections. Democratic politicians, for their part, have just about perfected their own boilerplate language. “When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” Biden asked in his Tuesday speech on the Uvalde shooting. “When in God’s name will we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?”
For the first time since the Sandy Hook shooting a decade ago, the Democratic party has the power to do what needs to be done. It controls the White House. It controls the House of Representatives. And it controls the Senate, where a bipartisan group of senators has talked in recent days about measures – from universal background checks to incentives for states to allow the confiscation of guns from threatening individuals – that probably would not have a prayer if Republicans were in the majority. But they still might not even now. While we will not have a clear sense of where everyone stands until the Senate returns from a fortuitously timed holiday, gun control legislation faces the same basic obstacles that have hobbled the rest of the Democratic party’s agenda – the filibuster and the rhetoric of consensus.
