Month: April 2013

Lindsey Graham is quite often the attack dog for Senator McCain in the Senate, so it’s interesting that he’s taking a hard position on the private sale ban:

“The current system is broken,” he said. “Why in the world would you expand that system if you’re not enforcing the law that exists today to include private transfers? So I think that legislation is going nowhere, but I’d like to have a robust debate about improving the system.”

McCain would be a crucial vote for getting to 60, in order to pass something in the Senate. I would have previously thought he’d have hung us out to dry long ago if the issue was banning private transfers, so I’m surprised he is (so far) holding out. Perhaps even Senator McCain sees the current proposal regulating even temporary transfers is completely unacceptable, but McCain’s bills regulating private transfers and gun shows were pretty awful too.

This is where things start to get tricky. If the Republicans and Democrats go along party lines, the Democrats have 55 votes out of the gate, but reality is that there would likely be some aisle crossing on both sides. This is where things can come down to how badly you lose, rather than whether you can win. Sure, you can bet the Dems can’t come up with 60 votes, and oppose any and everything, and maybe you’ll win that bet. But what if you don’t? Do you trust House leadership to kill anything that passes the Senate with a 60 vote margin, even if it’s something as bad as Schumer’s background check bill? Do you float an alternative bill that has the worst of what you oppose removed, and offer a sacrifice to the “something must be done” gods?

We’ve been here many times before, and short of total victory, there will be a lot of second guessing and blame going around. But what choice would you make? If the choice is between bad and disastrous, do you risk disastrous? I think there are times when the answer to that is yes, but I don’t think it’s always a black or white issue. It may be that we’re confident they can’t get to 60 on anything, or the House is a stronger bulwark against gun control than I would imagine, and opposing anything and everything is the smart tactic for this particular situation. But I don’t think we ought to be blind to reality, and reality is that when you’re dealing with slim margins the situation can go south in a hurry.

If all 80 million, or hell, even 20 million, gun owners called or wrote their Senators, we would not even be having this conversation, but the reality is most will not. Meanwhile, Bloomberg will continue to run ads telling everyone how reasonable “universal background checks” are, and who could be opposed to that? The White House will continue to twist arms. Lobbyists on their side tell lawmakers to look at their polling, and try to convince them any opposition to gun control is already baked into the election figured. Our lobbyists will show their polling, and threaten to upset apple carts in 2014. Can we keep 41 Senators? How confident would you be?

From a New Yorker article our opponents seem to be quite enamored over:

If American had gun laws like those in Canada, England, or Australia, it would have a level of gun violence more like that of Canada, England, or Australia. That’s as certain a prediction as any that the social sciences can provide. To believe that gun control can’t work here is to believe that the psyches of Americans are different from those of everyone else on earth. That’s a form of American exceptionalism—the belief that Americans are uniquely evil and incorrigibly violent, and that nothing to be done about it—that doesn’t seem to be the one that is usually endorsed.

This is essentially a restatement of, “The Arabs yearn for liberal democracy, all we have to do is bring it to them.” Culture matters, a lot. There are parts of this country that do have gun violence levels that low, despite being awash in guns, and there are places, like Chicago, who have restrictions even more severe than Canada and Australia who have many times the crime rates.

Even minus culture, this is already a country with 300 million guns and they aren’t going to disappear just because the laws change. The New Yorker article points to this JAMA study, which includes suicides, and is therefore deceiving. I did a similar run with just crime figures and found there’s no strong correlation.

Our opponents firmly disagree with this, and the meddling nanny doctors groups certainly will, but suicide prevention cannot be a reason for depriving everyone of dangerous objects in a free society. We are not infants, and a free people’s government shouldn’t treat its people like infants.