By Charles C. W. Cooke
Thursday, June 16, 2022
Is the gun-control movement suffering
from amnesia? The coverage of the Senate’s ongoing debate on guns once again
makes me wonder.
In the Washington Post, Mike
DeBonis casts the Murphy–Cornyn framework that the Senate is currently
considering as an “inflection point” and a “a watershed moment” that might, per
Senator Blumenthal of Connecticut, have the effect of “breaking the gun lobby’s
grip on Congress.” Elsewhere, such language is de rigueur. Senator
Schumer was quoted a few days ago as saying that he is “pleased that, for the first
time in nearly 30 years, Congress is on the path to take meaningful action to
address gun violence.” In USA Today, Senator Murphy hailed “a breakthrough agreement on gun violence — the first in 30 years
— that will save lives.” At the BBC, Gabby Giffords was quoted as crowing that the measure will “be the first time in 30 years
that Congress takes major action on gun safety.” And, in the Guardian,
David Hogg is cited as being confident that he is watching “senators reach a
bipartisan deal on guns for the first time in 30 years.”
On his personal website, Senator Murphy
has expanded on
this “30 years” idea, proposing that, if passed, the
Murphy–Cornyn plan will break “the thirty year logjam on the issue of gun
violence,” becoming “the most significant piece of anti-gun violence
legislation in nearly 30 years.” But, surely, Murphy cannot have forgotten
that, just five years ago, he and Senator Cornyn got together to write a different piece of “anti-gun violence legislation,” and
that, when they announced that plan to the public, Murphy cast it in terms
almost identical to those he is using today. The 2017 legislation, Murphy
explained at the time, was “a big deal,” “a bipartisan breakthrough on gun
legislation,” “an important milestone that shows real compromise can be made on
the issue of guns,” and “the most important piece of bipartisan guns
legislation since Manchin-Toomey.” In 2018, that “important” step was signed
into law.
Today? It doesn’t exist. Indeed, when
Chris Murphy looks back at the last 30 years, he sees no significant gun-law
reforms after 1994. The “big deal” has become invisible. The “breakthrough” has
become a blip. The “milestone” has been memory-holed.
To those who have been paying attention,
this cycle is somewhat familiar. In Step One, the advocates of stricter
gun-control laws convince Republicans to consider some new restrictions on the
Second Amendment. In Step Two, the media and the Democratic Party cast the
resulting negotiations as an unprecedented and long-awaited “breakthrough” that
might yield the “first significant gun control legislation since 1994.” In Step
Three, the bill passes and is signed into law. And, in Step Four, it is
completely forgotten about the moment it seems politically feasible to restart
the cycle.
Today, we’re witnessing Step Two.
This habit is not new, and it is by no
means limited to Senator Murphy. In 2008, ABC News hailed the congressional response to the massacre at Virginia Tech as
“the first major federal gun control measure in more than 13 years,” and
suggested that, if it had been in effect, “it might have prevented” that
attack. Today, that law has been conveniently forgotten — including by ABC
itself. In a piece published last
month, “Why gun control efforts in Congress
have mostly failed for 30 years,” the outlet doesn’t even mention it in a long
list of “notable pieces of federal gun legislation that either passed or were
defeated in Congress.”
A similar tendency applies to coverage of
the NRA, which is invariably cast both as the sole cause of American opposition
to gun control and as a spent force that is finally on the
verge of being vanquished. To listen to the American media — and to the
activists that it promotes — one gets the impression that the NRA has opposed
every piece of gun-control legislation that was proposed in the last three
decades, and that the key to changing this is for the “reformers” to rack up a
single, zeitgeist-changing win. But this isn’t true. The 2008 law that ABC
called “the first major federal gun control measure in more than 13 years” was
supported by the NRA, which explained at the time that it had “tried to get
this done in federal legislation since the mid-90s.” The NRA also backed
President Trump’s 2017 ban on bump stocks — yet another change that was lauded
at the time as politically and legally significant, but that has now been
forgotten in the interest of pretending that, if the latest legislative
proposal can just make it over the finish line, the gun lobby’s supposedly
unbroken streak of wins will finally come to an end.
Why does this happen? The answer is
simple: It happens because the modern gun-control movement has no limiting
principle governing its ambition, and because it is not as good at hiding this
as it believes itself to be. Senator Murphy doesn’t really believe
that the deals he has negotiated with John Cornyn are important; he thinks that
they will help him get a little faster to where he truly wants to be, which is
importing Australia’s gun laws into the United States. This being so, it is
firmly in Senator Murphy’s interest to pretend that he has never before gotten
his own way on the issue, lest Americans who are skeptical of the idea that
“progress” means “more gun control” be uncouth enough to ask him whether the
laws he has already spearheaded have actually done anything worthwhile.
From Murphy’s perspective, the relentless
focus on the early 1990s is entirely understandable. Back then, within the
space of two years, Congress enacted a sweeping federal background-check system
and prohibited the sale of modern sporting rifles. If one had based one’s
presumptions on other Western countries — Britain and Australia, say — one
might have reasonably assumed that this was the opening stage of a gradual
dismantling of the right to keep and bear arms. But that didn’t happen.
Instead, Americans trebled the number of privately owned guns in circulation;
pretty much every state liberalized its laws; concealed carry moved first to
being allowed with a permit and then, in at least half the states, to being
allowed without one; the 1994 prohibition on “assault weapons” expired and
wasn’t renewed; the Supreme Court confirmed that “the right of the people to
keep and bear arms” means what it plainly says; and, amid these developments,
crimes and murders committed with firearms were halved in
every region of the country, for every demographic group.
All that’s been forgotten, too.
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