Salon : Why the Dems Dumped Gun Control

Democrats have been turning away from gun control ever since Al Gore's run for the presidency. . . In the wake of Gore's loss, many Democrats blamed the defeat on previous pro-gun control positions Gore had taken, and pulled the party further back from where it had been on the issue.

Today, a substantial portion of the party's new standard-bearers are pro-gun, or at least anti-gun control. Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor who now heads the Democratic National Committee and is the favorite of the new party power base emerging from the Internet, has long been an opponent of gun control. So has Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., the man whose squeaker victory in November gave Democrats control of the Senate and who was selected to give the party's response to President Bush's State of the Union address this year. Last month, one of Webb's aides was arrested on his way in to a Senate building with one of Webb's guns in his possession. Webb responded with a spirited defense of his right and need to bear arms. Even Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the new Senate majority leader, is pro-gun.

Not a bad article as regards the politics, but the writer should stick to politics and leave the discussion on guns to those who actually know something about them. There is, for example, this gem of ignorance:

The expiration of the [Scary-Looking Gun] ban may have had some consequences in Blacksburg. ABC News has speculated that the shooter probably used a high-capacity ammunition clip of a type that was prohibited under the ban but became widely available when the ban expired.

The first sentence is pure speculation. The second sentence is speculation combined with completely wrong facts.

First of all, this talk about supposed "consequences" of the expiration of the Scary-Looking Gun Ban as regards the death toll of the Virginia Tech shootings is just stupid. There are some facts that everyone (and particularly every "journalist") needs to come to grips with:

If you are shot with a firearm at close range, there is a fairly decent chance you will suffer some very negative consequences.

You're likely to suffer negative consequences whether you are shot with a flintlock, a revolver, a semi-auto pistol, a semi-auto rifle, a shotgun or a bolt-action hunting rifle, but you are MOST likely to die if you are shot with a hunting rifle or shotgun.

The severity of your injury will be the same whether the gun has a scary black plastic stock or a pretty wooden one.

The severity of your injury will be the same whether the gun has a 30-round clip or a 10-round clip.

The severity of your injury will be the same whether or not the gun has a bayonet, a grenade launcher, a flash hider, a barrel shroud, a pistol grip or a folding stock.

In other words, the Scary-Looking Gun Ban was an exercise in stupidity, and anyone who thinks it had any significant effect on the lethality of firearms is either ill-informed or an idiot. Given the choice between:

(a) facing a maniacal gunman packing thirty rounds in one 30-round clip or

(b) facing a maniacal gunman packing thirty rounds in three 10-round clips or

(c) facing a maniacal gunman packing thirty rounds in two 15-round clips

I'm pretty much agnostic. Even a halfway-experienced shooter can replace a semi-auto clip and chamber the next round in a fraction of a second. Any of the above maniacal gunmen will very likely cause me severe bodily injury.

Further, the Scary Looking Gun Ban didn't "prohibit" any clips. It restricted the manufacture of certain clips, but there was never a time during the "ban" when I ever went looking for any of the supposedly "prohibited" clips at a gun show and couldn't find one for sale openly and under perfectly legal circumstances. In many cases, the "ban" made the "prohibited" clips a bit pricier due to a perception that they might be scarce in the future, but clips are mechanically simple devices that tend to last a long time. Military clips are designed to be loaded and unloaded many more times than your average enthusiast will ever get around to doing over the time he owns the gun. Like the rest of a gun, a clip is designed to have a long life. The only people the Scary-Looking Gun Ban kept from buying clips were the folks who couldn't scrape together an extra $10 or $20 for the supposedly "rare" clips.

The author also speculates:

The other major piece of anti-gun legislation passed in the Clinton era, the Brady Bill, has been weakened as well, because of rules put in place by former Attorney General John Ashcroft when he took office in 2001.

I'm not familiar with the supposed "weakening" of the background checks under Ashcroft, but I haven't heard any analysis connecting any "weakening" to Cho's ability to buy guns. If there's no connection, how can that have had any effect on the shootings at Virginia Tech? If it had no effect on the shootings, why is it in this paragraph?

Moving back to a topic the writer actually knows something about, the article goes on to explain Dem ambivalence on gun control as follows:

The desire to court voters in swing states with a large percentage of gun owners is the primary reason that Democrats have recently tended to view the issue of gun control as poisonous. There were other reasons as well, however. First, there were fears that support for gun control could split a key Democratic constituency: union members. A survey done by Americans for Gun Safety has shown that 54 percent of union households own a gun. Moreover, gun control is an issue with what Spitzer describes as "hassle" and "intensity" factors that don't favor advocates. Supporters of gun rights are passionate in a way that supporters of gun control are not -- gun-rights backers are single-issue voters and activists, while on the other side, Spitzer says, "the typical gun control supporter is somebody for whom the issue is not a No. 1 concern, it's No. 6 or No. 8."

Doug Hattaway, who was national spokesman for Gore's 2000 campaign and is now the president of Hattaway Communications, concurs. Hattaway notes that organizations like the Brady Campaign cite the high public support for gun control measures, but says that support doesn't translate into electoral victories for Democrats.

"There's a difference between agreeing on an issue and having it motivate your vote," Hattaway says. "Yes, people agree, but there's not a potent pro-gun control constituency in national elections."

Full article here.

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