Op-Ed: The Progressive Gun-Control Charade

After tragedy, politicians glibly call for unworkable reforms—then blame the ‘gun lobby’ when they fail.

In the wake of horrific crimes like the recent mass shooting in Oregon, many in the political class respond as if there were an easy way to keep such tragedies from happening. If it weren’t for the stubbornness of the National Rifle Association, the story goes, these deadly incidents could be prevented. Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton urged “sensible restraints,” and said if she is elected president she would use her executive authority to impose them.

This sort of rhetoric suggests that there is a workable policy sitting on the shelf, ready for implementation. It also attempts to have it both ways, suggesting that effective gun control is possible without reaching into America’s gun safes and disarming ordinary citizens.

It’s notable how much the rhetoric has changed since the peak of the national gun-ban movement, when politicians talked honestly about reducing violence by constricting the gun supply—and what that would require. In a 1989 Senate hearing, Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, a Democrat from Ohio, candidly explained: “If you don’t ban all of them you might as well ban none of them.” But gun bans proved unpalatable to American voters in even the most liberal jurisdictions. In 1976 Massachusetts voters rejected a handgun ban referendum 69% to 24%, with 86% of eligible voters going to the polls. In 1982 California voters rejected a handgun “freeze,” which would have barred their sale, 63% to 37%, with a voter turnout of 72%.

In the decades since, the politics of gun control have become a kind of minuet. Progressive politicians pander to a core liberal constituency with gun-control rhetoric, all while chasing the votes of the 42% of American households, according to Gallup, that own one. The photo-op of the candidate duded up for hunting or skeet shooting is a common ploy.

Once elected, these politicians advance incremental gun restrictions that are demonstrably inadequate—for instance, the now-expired ban on “assault weapons,” which barred new sales of a narrow class of rifles outfitted with pistol grips and adjustable stocks but allowed continued sales of the same guns minus those features.

Gun owners and Second Amendment activists understand that Howard Metzenbaum was absolutely right about the logic of supply-side gun control. So they resist incremental gun controls on the understanding that the latest proposal cannot be the last step. And when these half-measures fail, in either passage or effectiveness, progressives can always blame the “gun lobby.”

This interplay allows progressive politicians to claim they have no interest in gun confiscation, and still wax heroic about lost battles over glittery legislative proposals that in practice would not have prevented the crimes they purport to address. Everyone, across the political spectrum, should reject this kind of duplicity.

Click here to read the entire article from the Wall Street Journal.