Liberals, conservatives, and guns. Liberals, conservatives, and guns, and the elephant in America’s living room.

Which elephant, you say? Why, the elephant that’s always there. The elephant of race.

It was the assassination of John F. Kennedy that first brought liberals’ long-running distaste/discomfort/hatred of guns to the fore. However, it was the race riots of the sixties, and the dramatic increase in violent street crime among young black men that really made gun control a national controversy. Liberals, desperately seeking an “answer” to the soaring black crime rates, which they had confidently predicted would go down with the end of segregation, hoped that restricting (really, banning) the sale of handguns would finesse the issue of violent crime. Instead of pouring resources into catching and imprisoning criminals, simply take away their guns and they become harmless.

A great number of frightened whites, of course, had the completely opposite reaction. Instead of wanting to ban guns, they wanted to have them, to defend their families and themselves against rioting blacks. The higher crime rates rose, the more desperate liberals became, and the more hungry to ban guns, of virtually any sort. This had the natural effect of driving gun owners to the right, and the National Rifle Association, once a collection of hunters, became the voice of a million would-be Dirty Harrys, flourishing their .357 Magnums and dreaming of streetsweepers and all the other grotesque urban guerilla weaponry they saw at the multiplex.

After the beatdown Democrats suffered in 1994, the election that taught them the dangers of relying exclusively on the “soccer mom” vote, liberals tried to back off the gun issue. Despite the deep emotional revulsion many liberals felt at the thought of gun ownership—why would anyone want to “own” death? Isn’t that the very definition of sickness?—meaningful gun control was a clear political impossibility. And, as crime rates fell, the whole issue lost immediacy.

The election of Barack Obama frightened the NRA, not because he might ban guns, but because it appeared that the Democrats had abandoned the issue. When no one wants to take your guns away, who needs the NRA? Following Obama’s election, two Supreme Court decisions in 2010, DC v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago, by “discovering” a right of self-defense in the Second Amendment, seemed to take the issue of gun control entirely off the table.¹

However, as it proved, liberals, though beaten on the issue, had not forgotten it. The murders of 20 young school children at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012 pushed liberals out of their cold political calculation. I believe that President Obama wanted to make some emotional gesture to the devastated parents, that, in effect, their children had not died in vain. I’m sure he wanted to believe that gun-control legislation passed after Sandy Hook would prevent future violence, but ultimately I think his first concern was that a gesture be made in acknowledgement of the parents’ agony. The NRA, unfortunately, chose to be unyielding. The moral of Sandy Hook, as far as the NRA was concerned, was that guns are more important than children, although they probably wouldn’t state it that way.

Following Sandy Hook, liberals applauded virtually every measure of gun control, no matter how trivial or useless or unlikely to pass constitutional muster. The important thing was to do something. That mood was bad enough if, like me, you see gun control as either useless or unconstitutional², or both. Now President Obama has seen his legacy marred by the recent murders in San Bernardino and Orlando by self-proclaimed ISIS sympathizers, and later by the assassinations of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge by black nationalists. The tragedies have tempted him into the sort of stupid rhetoric that liberals are so often prone to when it comes to guns: “We flood communities with so many guns that it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than get his hands on a computer or even a book.”

If the president knew anything about guns, he’d know that buying an expensive gun like a Glock on the black market is not cheap or easy. When a Harvard Law School graduate can speak so stupidly about guns, well, you know you’re in for a bumpy flight.

Afterwords
I’m sure that the president, and many other liberals, would like to believe that if the U.S. had the sort of gun control laws that “everyone else has”, none of the recent killings would have happened, and the unfortunate and “inconvenient” political motives of the killers would be moot. As the outbreaks of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism in Europe have demonstrated, however, bans on firearm possession is not a guarantee. I have no idea what those responsible for the recent murders would have done if they couldn’t have purchased firearms legally. It isn’t that “easy” to buy an illegal firearm. You have to consort with career criminals, which most people don’t want to do. I suppose you can go to a gun show, where you don’t have to fill out a lot of paperwork.³ Would they have gone? I have no idea.