SPELUNKING IN THE MEMORY HOLE: Jesse Walker: Why Was There a 12-Year Gap in the Gun Debate? What happened to gun control from 2000 to 2012? Funny you should ask…
When Hillary Clinton unveiled her plans for new gun controls yesterday, she sounded a nostalgic note for her husband’s years in the White House. “There are a lot of ways for us to have constitutional, legal gun restrictions,” she said. “My husband did. He passed the Brady bill, and he eliminated assault weapons for 10 years. So we’re gonna take them on. We took them on in the ’90s. We’re gonna take them on again.”
Some voters, listening to this, might wonder whether anyone was taking “them” on after the ’90s ended. The short answer is: not really. Oh, the anti-gun lobby was still around, and they would occasionally send me lonely-sounding press releases. And some fights still flared up over local laws, with two of those battles making it to the Supreme Court. But as far as national politics were concerned, there was a great gap in the gun debate: a period of more than a decade when Washington did not see a significant push for new restrictions on the right to bear arms.
As with any historical period, we can argue about when exactly this started and stopped. But if precise dating is your thing, you can say it began on November 7, 2000, and ended on December 14, 2012. The first is the day Al Gore failed to carry his home state of Tennessee, a loss many observers blamed—along with his losses in several other swing states—on his support for stricter gun laws. The second is the day of the Sandy Hook massacre.
Well, 2012 is also the year the Democrats basically wrote off the possibility of recapturing the South, and decided instead to focus on minority voters. Plus:
Pleasing as this may sound to some parts of the Democratic coalition, other activists on the left have been wary. Bill Clinton’s gun controls were tightly linked to his tough-on-crime posturing; indeed, by driving Republicans to oppose what was presented as law’n’order legislation, they were a classic case of Clintonian triangulation. His assault weapons ban, a law generally regarded as having no notable impact on crime rates, was embedded in the crime bill of 1994, a law that did so much to amp up incarceration that the former president eventually apologized for its effects. His Gun-Free Schools Act, also passed in 1994, helped launch the era of zero tolerance and the school-to-prison pipeline. Basically, the Clinton-era anti-gun rhetoric that this year’s candidates have been reviving overlapped heavily with the Clinton-era carceral policies that the candidates have made a big deal of rejecting. And the more the party’s leaders flirt with ideas like an Australian-style confiscation of weapons, with all the intrusive policing that would require in a gun-loving culture like America’s, the more that tension will look like a full-fledged contradiction.
Indeed.