Why Democrats dumped gun control

Monday's shooting at Virginia Tech is a reminder that the party that once championed gun control has been running away from it since the 2000 election.

By Alex Koppelman

Read more: George W. Bush, Democratic Party, Al Gore, Politics, National Rifle Association, Joseph Lieberman, News, John Kerry, Alex Koppelman, Virginia Tech Shootings

April 18, 2007 | Monday's mass shooting on the campus of Virginia Tech will undoubtedly lead, as so many tragedies do, to a search for answers, for those measures that will ensure that something like the massacre in Blacksburg never happens again. And that search will almost inevitably lead, as it has in the past, to a discussion of gun control.

During the Bush administration, however, gun control has been all but dead as a political issue, and though George W. Bush is one of the most pro-gun presidents in history, much of the responsibility lies with Democrats. Once a popular talking point for Democratic officials and candidates, gun control has been shoved to the background over the past six years, as the party -- trying not to alienate gun-owning voters in swing states -- has cooled its rhetoric on the issue and tamped down its action. Gun control advocates haven't won a major victory since Bill Clinton was president, and since then the main anti-gun legislation of the Clinton era has either died or been stripped of its teeth.

"We've gone backwards in a lot of areas," says Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. "In effect, the only real gun law we've got on the books now is the Brady background checks."

Robert J. Spitzer, a distinguished service professor of political science at the State University of New York at Cortland, who wrote the book "The Politics of Gun Control," agrees. "It's an issue that's largely off the table," Spitzer explains. "You've got, basically, the Democrats running away from the issue and deciding that this is not where they want to hang their hats, and Republicans who are . . . extremely sympathetic to the policy goals of the [National Rifle Association]."

Democrats have been turning away from gun control ever since Al Gore's run for the presidency. The then-vice president and his advisors had tried to out-gun-control liberal challenger Bill Bradley during the Democratic primaries. Campaigning against George W. Bush in the general election, Gore decided to quiet his criticism of the NRA and mute his support for gun control to build support in battleground states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan where support for gun rights runs high. 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.

Recently, the party actually used a Republican's apparently lukewarm devotion to guns against him. A press release put out by the DNC hit former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, currently a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, on his record of support for gun control and conflicting statements on his own use of guns. In the release, DNC spokesman Damien LaVera ridiculed Romney, saying, "Either Mitt Romney's brand new NRA lifetime membership card wasn't activated in time to get him into the convention or Romney was afraid he wouldn't be able to smooth talk his way out of his record on gun issues."

Along with the Democratic Party's turn away from a strong public stance on gun control has come a reversal of some of the victories that gun-control advocates won during the administration of former President Bill Clinton. Primary among those victories was the federal assault weapons ban, which was passed in 1994, but included a "sunset provision" that mandated its expiration 10 years later. In 2004, Democrats in the Senate did manage to approve, by a vote of 52-47, an extension of the ban as a rider attached by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., to another bill. But that was relatively uncontroversial; that year, the University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election Survey found that 71 percent of people in households without guns, and 64 percent of people in households with them, supported continuing the ban. Even 46 percent of people living with an NRA member favored the ban. President Bush was also a supporter, if a lukewarm one.

Yet despite that level of public approval, Democrats couldn't get a continuation of the ban to stick. Part of the problem was that the bill to which the extension of the ban and all the other riders were attached, S. 1805, banned many types of lawsuits against gun manufacturers and sellers. It was a pet project of the NRA, and all the riders may have been intended as "poison pills." Opponents of the proposed law, who didn't have enough votes to kill it outright, weighted it down with a series of gun-control amendments that would be unacceptable to the NRA. An amendment that would have closed the loophole that applies to gun shows, and forced sellers there to conduct background checks on buyers, was attached by a vote of 53-46, as was another amendment to require the provision of child safety locks whenever ownership of a handgun was transferred. (Another amendment, however, that would have expanded the ban on armor-piercing ammunition, went down to defeat, 34-63. Thirteen Democrats, including then Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle and current Majority Leader Reid, crossed the aisle to vote against that amendment.)

Ultimately, because of the gun-control provisions that had been tacked on to the lawsuit immunity bill, the NRA turned against a bill it had once backed. The group asked its supporters in the Senate to kill the measure. They did, 90-8.

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