I’m one of those liberals who regard gun control as a political loser, an irrelevance, and an impossibility. No one can show any kind of relation between gun control and decrease in gun-related violence, so what’s the point? “Bans” are very unlikely to do any good, because there are millions of weapons, assault rifles, banana clips, etc. already in play.
Most of the politics of gun control revolve around people who hate guns and people who love them, emotional attitudes that are irrelevant to the actual impact of gun legislation, whether pro or anti. Banning guns hasn’t made Washington, DC safer, but neither has “concealed carry” made Florida safer (or unsafer).
In immediate political terms, the NRA might have to beat a tactical retreat and accept a meaningless ban on assault rifles, which would be fine by me. I dislike the NRA very much, and any loss they have to suffer, however symbolic, pleases me. Their exploitation of the “Fast and Furious” caper, which appears to be largely an instance of bureaucratic backbiting, ginned up by unscrupulous Republicans in the House of Representatives (is there any other kind?) I found to be completely contemptible. The NRA’s hysterical membership is terrified that Obama will take their guns away because he is a black man. The NRA’s cunning leadership is terrified that Obama will abandon any efforts at gun control, depriving the organization of its reason for existence.
The NRA as we know it is a result of first the race riots of the Sixties and the massive increase in violent crime among blacks that followed, coupled with the liberal attempts to finesse the issue of black crime via gun control. Liberal efforts to strike at the “roots of crime” were a uniform failure, and Americans, most of them, wanted their guns. Now crime rates have fallen dramatically, though they’re still far too high, but rural America still remains on alert. In large part, this is simply a part of the larger Red State/Blue State culture war, a war that the Red States are slowly losing, as recently demonstrated by the stinging loss suffered by Mitt Romney to President Obama. The war on guns is a war that, basically, we liberals have lost, and can afford to lose, since, as I’ve said, it’s a war over symbols rather than reality. We can win the war by losing, by not giving the NRA a reason to exist. This ugliness will pass, as ugliness does. But when it does, I hope that the memory of the ugliness of guns will not be forgotten.
