Where Will the Gun Control Debate Go Now (if
Anywhere)?
For the first time since they took back power in
Washington, Democrats face a major test on a recurring, intractable issue.
By Giovanni
Russonello
March 23,
2021
Updated
10:08 p.m. ET
Senators,
assemble, stage left and stage right, and face the audience. Now, express your
outrage and frustration. Demand change. Or, if you’re standing on the right,
direct your outrage at those across from you, ridiculing them for suggesting
that changing the laws might even address the problem.
This
theatrical blocking is all too familiar by now, playing out with an uncanny
consistency every time a mass shooting takes place in the United States. So it
hardly felt like a real coincidence that on Monday, the night before the Senate
Judiciary Committee was scheduled to hold a hearing to address “Constitutional
and Common Sense Steps to Reduce Gun Violence,” another mass shooting occurred
— this time in Boulder, Colo., where a gunman opened fire at a grocery store,
killing 10 people.
The
Democratically controlled House earlier this month passed two relatively modest
bills that would expand and strengthen background checks for gun sales, a move
that more than four in five Americans support.
But in this
theater, even the recitation of statistics showing public support for gun
control can start to feel wearying — a reminder of the political roadblocks to
passage as much as a token of the public will for change.
Those two
bills appear to have little chance of passing the Senate, where they would need
at least 10 Republican votes to neutralize the threat of a filibuster.
At the
Judiciary Committee’s hearing today, Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of
Iowa, pointed to the fact that those bills passed with little Republican
support in the House, holding up the G.O.P.’s own intransigence as evidence
that the Democrats were trying to do too much.
In his
remarks, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas — who has co-written a more conservative
piece of gun-related legislation with Mr. Grassley — struck a similar note. He
insisted that gun control wouldn’t do anything to stop gun violence, and his
role onstage was that of both actor and theater critic.
“Every time
there’s a shooting, we play this ridiculous theater where this committee gets
together and proposes a bunch of laws that would do nothing to stop these
murders,” Mr. Cruz said. “If you want to stop these murders, go after the
murderers,” he added.
Democrats
pushed back, saying that the shootings in Colorado and Georgia should force
lawmakers to gather the political will needed to pass gun legislation,
particularly as there has been an increase in violence across the board,
including gun-related violence, in the past year.
“Thoughts
and prayers cannot save the eight victims in Atlanta, or the 10 last night,”
said Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, which passed some of the
country’s strictest state-level gun laws after the shooting at Sandy Hook
Elementary School in Newtown in 2012.
Mr.
Blumenthal echoed the youth activists who have taken a leading role on gun
control when he emphasized that gun violence and racial justice were
interrelated, pointing out that racial animus had often been the starting point
for gun violence throughout American history.
“The
hate-motivated shootings that tore through Atlanta last week are just the
latest example; they won’t be the last,” he said. “Without access to a weapon,
the Atlanta shooter is just a racist and a misogynist. But armed with a
firearm, purchased that very day, he is a monster — a mass murderer.”
The
Republican lawmakers’ arguments often had a cultural undertone, too. In his
questioning, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas insisted that the rule of law, as
presently written, should be enough to stop gun violence. And he turned his
questioning into a wholesale attack on efforts to overhaul the criminal-justice
system, tapping into the themes of former President Donald Trump’s unsuccessful
re-election campaign last year.
“Our
friends on the left always want to go straight to gun control as the solution
for reducing this problem of violence,” he said.
“Notably,
there has been extended, systematic attacks on our police and law enforcement
professionals for years, calling them racist and bigoted and prejudiced.
Demanding that they be defunded and replaced with social workers. When you
condemn the police, when you make it harder to do their job, you shouldn’t be
surprised that criminals take advantage of the opportunities that follow.”
Mr. Cotton
ridiculed reform advocates for pointing out that the United States locks up
more prisoners than any other country. “Some on the left like to complain about
mass incarceration — as if there are too many people locked up in our prisons,
when more than half of violent crimes don’t even result in an arrest,” he said.
(One
statistic he didn’t mention: About half of those imprisoned in the United
States are there for nonviolent offenses.)
Some areas
of possible consensus emerged, including on “extreme risk” or “red flag” laws,
a topic brought up by Senator Dianne Feinstein, a moderate Democrat from
California. These kinds of laws, which are on the books in over a dozen states,
allow family members and law-enforcement officers to request that a judge
restrict a seemingly dangerous person’s access to guns.
But when it
comes to the House’s background-check bills, there’s little chance of passage
in the Senate. Senator Joe Manchin, a centrist Democrat from West Virginia who
has long sought to find consensus on gun control, has said he opposes it
because it would require background checks even in sales between private
citizens. He and Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican from Pennsylvania, have written
a separate bill — but even that one stands little chance of passage, absent
some revision of the filibuster.
In remarks
from the White House today, President Biden pushed for more than an expansion
to background checks. He said he wanted to reinstate a ban on assault weapons
and high-capacity magazines, like the one he helped to pass as a senator in the
1990s. “This is not and should not be a partisan issue — it is an American
issue,” Mr. Biden said. “We have to act.”
My
experience of interviewing Senator Bernie Sanders is that you’re usually
talking to someone who recognizes that he’s rowing against the tides of
American politics. You’re typically talking about what he believes the
president should be doing, but isn’t, or what the Democratic Party should be
supporting, but isn’t.
But the
American Rescue Plan was different. It’s President Biden’s bill, of course, but
it’s the kind of thing that Mr. Sanders has been fighting to pass for years.
So, too, with the full-employment-through-investment package coming next. And
so I wanted to hear what Mr. Sanders makes of this moment, where it seems that
he lost the election, but won many of the arguments.
So I asked
him on my podcast, and what I got was a much more optimistic Mr. Sanders than
I’ve ever spoken to before. “Congress does not pass perfect bills,” he told me.
“But for working-class people, this is the most significant piece of
legislation passed since the 1960s.”
We also
talked about the filibuster, where he’s moved from supporting it even during
the 2020 campaign, to opposing it now; and about the fights over speech and
culture, where he clearly has some concerns with where liberals are moving, and
how hard that makes it to talk to voters who might otherwise agree with them on
economics.
“These
cultural issues,” he said, “I don’t know how you bridge the gap.” But “somehow
or another, the intellectual elite does have, in some cases, a contempt for the
people who live in rural America,” he said, and he argued that the first step
to winning those voters back is proving that you respect them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-bernie-sanders.html
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