A common theme I’ve been seeing floating around in the media is that gun control is back, baby! They’ve crossed “the threshold” and are on their way to victory. There’s a certain zeitgeist, and the pendulum is swinging back in their direction. Is it true? Even WaPo’s Dana Milbank thinks they are overstating their case, but agrees there’s some truth to it. How has the gun control movement revitalized itself? According to Milbank, gun control movement has seen revitalization by lowing their sights to win on more achievable issues like background checks.
But there is some truth to what he says. From the legislative debacle following Sandy Hook, the gun-control movement has retreated to a limited but pragmatic approach. Gone is the notion of “gun control,†replaced by “reducing gun deaths†or “gun violence prevention.†Gone, for now, are efforts to restrict any type of gun or ammunition. Instead, the movement has found a laser focus on background checks.
I can’t think of too many real movements that have revitalized themselves by thinking smaller, and thinking smaller is nothing new. None of the new terms Milbank points to are actually new. Gun control advocates have been trying to get away from the unpopular term “gun control” since at least the mid-1990s, and none of those efforts made any difference. Andrew McKelvey couldn’t sell “gun safety” any better than Sarah Brady could sell “handgun control.”
All of the articles I’ve seen have ignored the elephant in the room. I agree that the gun control movement is seeing some revitalization. I would agree they’ve recovered from their post-Heller blues. I do think that’s correct. But it’s almost entirely because Mike Bloomberg is willing to spend millions of dollars of his massive fortune to make that happen. Without Bloomberg’s money, the gun control movement would be going nowhere. All the victories the gun control movement has achieved have been bought and paid for by one multi-billionaire who thinks he can buy our Republic, and he may be right!
*This* is them with a laser focus on background checks?
Though I think a lot of the “Gun control is back” is trying to leverage the enthusiasm gap that gun control has.
It seems that a lot of these “we’re rebranding Gun control” articles *and* the “Oh yes we’re coming for their guns” articles are directed more towards reassuring / inflaming passions of the rank and file gun control advocates. (With a bunch of virtue signaling thrown in).
It will be interesting to see if Bloomberg gets more… direct in his payments to push gun control. The man is 73. So much of his ego and vanity is rolled into this… What happens when he feels mortality’s ticking clock and really opens the floodgates?
“What happens when he feels mortality’s ticking clock and really opens the floodgates?”
Well, given what we’ve seen the last few election cycles,it seems that he’s opening his wallet wider every election.
Oh, “gun control” is back all right, and it’s threatening to set off a civil war via gun confiscation in which MILLIONS of Americans will die, and almost certainly, the “gun controllers” themselves will wake up dead.
I agree with you.
The whole silliness of UBCs is only there to set up a registry for eventual confiscation.
If they know where all the guns are due to draconian UBC penalties, they can declare firearm “X” is no longer legal or that people group “Y” cannot have a firearm and out go the threatening letters to those who have them.
Always backed up by the promises of cancelling your Obamacare coverage, IRS audits, BATFE raids, BLM or EPA land seizures and so on.
“Gone is the notion of ‘gun control'”
It seems to me that the notion of gun control is still around with all of the old policies they were pushing. They’re just calling it a different name now.
To paraphrase The Bard: What’s in a name? That which we call sewage by any other name would smell as foul?
Is it really even a new name?
I mean “Gun Voilence Prevention” sounds rather… similar to “Coalition to Prevent Gun Voilence”.
For that matter, wasn’t the Brady Campaign’s official title “The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence”? It used to be “Handgun Control Inc”, but they changed that name years ago!
Actually putting “Gun Safety” in the titles of organizations is new, but it’s been a rallying cry for quite a while now.
Come to think of it, perhaps we would do well to create organizations for “Gun Safety” and put in the charter platitudes about educating the public about the dangers of guns, and then, after getting gobs of money from Bloomberg, start using that money to teach people how to mitigate the dangers that guns present–and how to use those inherent dangers of guns to mitigate dangers of the two- and four-legged variety!
And how to diverting the dangers that guns present down-range can be quite fun, when done safely…
Are they really thinking smaller? They are framing it as being smaller, but really their “background check” proposals make the 94 Assault Weapons Ban look like gun control light. The AWB was a ten year ban that only covered sales and manufacturing with an automatic sunset. What they present as “sensible background checks” in actuality creates millions of felonies daily around the gun culture, which if enforced in earnest would create massive disarmament, imprisonment, and cause major damage to the gun culture.
Even that aside they haven’t abandoned the AWB. Both President Obama and Clinton are still advocating for AWBs.