What to Say About Guns?

Last week, a gunman on Virginia Tech's campus killed 32 people. The debate has been on since then — should there be more restrictions on guns? What can we do to avoid another Virginia Tech?

After the shooting at the Amish school in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania last year, those words were substituted instead — what can be done to stop the next Nickel Mines? It happens over and over again. Nickel Mines was the next Columbine, Virginia Tech was the next Nickel Mines. People keep killing each other, and depending on what's available to them at the time, some use more exotic or deadly weaponry than others.

Most of the political discussion last week concerned what Democrats will do legislatively as a response to the Virginia Tech killings. There have been numerous calls to increase restrictions, to write new laws making it harder to buy guns, or to reinstate the assault weapons ban passed by the Clinton administration in 1994, which expired in 2004.

Democrats are apparently considering legislation to force improvements in mental health reporting to the federal database which your identity is checked against when you purchase a gun, and because of how it is couched it may receive some modicum of support. I don't know that it will definitely pass — it will be labeled an expansion of federal regulations on gun ownership, which it is — but it might. It is hard to argue against the logic that mentally disturbed people should not have access to firearms, but you watch. The argument will be made, and it will be made by the NRA, and some hardline Republicans, and possibly even some Democrats from the South, for whom voting to increase federal regulations on guns is the functional equivalent of of declaring allegiance with al-Qaeda.

AP finds that Americans are divided along partisan, geographical, and gender lines when it comes to guns, and the opinions haven't changed much in the last 20 years or so. A majority of Americans aren't in favor of increasing gun control laws even in the immediate aftermath of the Virginia Tech killings. In doing research for this article, I came across more websites pondering why liberals hate guns than I would have reasonably expected, and quite a few by liberals who support and love guns, which wasn't surprising. Even among Democrats polled by AP last week on gun control, only sixty percent — the same percentage as women — think we should have tighter gun laws. If that's the national saturation (and other polls show it likely to be so), imagine what it might be in El Paso, or Phoenix, or Georgia. Or even Virginia.

I gave a presentation a few weeks ago at the Texas YD convention called "Building Alliances", the central tenet of which was that "Your Issues Don't Matter." I've said it to many volunteers and political neophytes that roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty in trying to get Democrats elected, and I will say it many more times before I hang it up. I also say that it is not enough to win the argument, and that it is not enough to be right; often, this is most true when we are unquestionably right on an issue, much to our chagrin.

Of course guns should be more tightly restricted. They can't be banned altogether; even The Economist recognizes that in its discussion of how not many American politicians are talking about gun control, even after Virginia Tech. But anyone who isn't on the NRA True Believer list understands there's a problem, that seemingly every other week someone goes somewhere with a gun and shoots people who only committed the crime of going to work, or going to class.

When it comes to Democratic politics, or getting Democrats elected, or maintaining a Democratic majority in Congress, our issues as individuals don't matter. Certainly, it is the Democratic Party's stance on some issues that put us where we are today, but not all of them. The Iraq War, Republican corruption, and George Bush's failed leadership gave the Democratic Party a dichotomy to draw, and an agenda with clear priorities set in foreign policy and domestic responsibility. Those were the issues we won on.

Despite the wave that carried many Democrats into office and the general feeling of being tired of Republicans, though, I would argue that any Democrat who managed to win a Congressional seat in the South would have been beaten like an ill-mannered mule if he'd embraced gun control, or any other of the traditionally liberal versions of The Wedge Issue. The same goes for Jim Webb. He is enthusiastically in favor of guns, and we like him just fine. If he'd done everything else the same and added a strong plank advocating the ban of assault weapons, no amount of cred from the rest of his campaign would have saved him.

So, in this case, even in the aftermath of Virginia Tech, even in the aftermath of another senseless shooting, if you're in the business of electing Democrats, gun control can't be your driving motivation. Especially in Texas, gun control cannot be the primary (or even a secondary or tertiary) issue for a candidate. Of course I am speaking generally — you might be able to run on it in Austin, I suppose — but in most places it is as bad as running on a state income tax. Or worse.

I, more than most, think the pattern of gun violence in America is something we could put a serious dent in with laws. That isn't to say that I think guns are the problem. I am convinced that a society in which several people a year go on killing sprees probably has some deep-rooted problems which bear examining. True, guns contribute to the problem, in that they are engineered specifically for killing things, and a great many of them are engineered specifically for killing people; but I also happen to know that if I want to help a candidate craft an effective message that works in Texas, what I think doesn't matter. If I want to volunteer on a campaign, I can't pass out push cards for Senate Candidate X and throw in my own pamphlet about how guns kill people, and help people kill people.

If you want to get guns banned, pursue that, with my heartfelt blessing. But issue politics and electoral politics do not equate to the same thing for Democrats like they do for Republicans. For the GOP, well, that's all they have. For us, it is all that loses us elections, precisely because of how the GOP has structured itself in the last twenty or thirty years. It will eventually prove to be the current Republican Party's undoing, and you can see that every day when you watch the news or read the paper. It still exists as a demarcation within the American electorate, though, and that means Issue Politics must be recognized as a battlefield with a Republican advantage.

The important thing to remember is that a majority creates leadership on the issues, and you have to get the majority before you can begin to truly redirect the river of conversation. In America, the gun debate is lost to conservatives for the foreseeable future. We have many problems to address, but I would argue that in the larger sense of things, Republican leadership is the worst problem we have in Texas, and that should be the primary target for the time being.