Prospects dim for new restrictions on gun ownership

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Fatal shootings in Binghamton, N.Y., and Pittsburgh prompted renewed calls for stricter gun control from traditional advocates such as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and the Rev. Jesse Jackson. But such calls haven't echoed in the halls of Congress or in statehouses across the country.
"The silence has been deafening," Dennis Goldford, a Drake University political scientist, said of federal lawmakers' response to new incidents of gun violence across the country.
In the face of a series of tragedies, the political position of opponents of firearms restrictions appears weaker than it's been in decades. On the national and state levels, the prospects for new restrictions on gun ownership are dim.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, gun-control debates were a staple of political discourse. But in more recent years, the national Democratic Party -- intent on expanding the party's natural constituency -- has essentially abandoned efforts to impose new restrictions on gun ownership.
"On the national level, the issue is considered toxic by Democrats," said Ross Baker, an expert on Congress at Rutgers University. "I think part of it has to do with (the Democrats') remarkable success in capturing seats previously held by Republicans. Many of these new Democrats ran on platforms of not tampering with Second Amendment rights, and they don't want to pull the rug out from under them."
Accepting his party's nomination last year, President Obama heartened gun-control advocates as he said, "The reality of gun ownership may be different for hunters in rural Ohio than for those plagued by gang violence in Cleveland, but don't tell me we can't uphold the Second Amendment while keeping AK-47s out of the hands of criminals."
The White House Web site's description of the administration's agenda calls for a variety of gun-control measures, including a revival of the federal ban on so-called assault weapons and the requirement that sales at gun shows be subject to the same identity-check rules as sales from dealers. But the Democratic majority at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue has shown no appetite to act on any of those proposals.
Attorney General Eric Holder -- during an inspection tour focused on violence along the Mexican border -- recently called again for a return to the assault-weapons ban that was sunsetted in 2004. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was quick to dismiss the notion.
The political reality behind that reluctance was reflected in a recent Gallup Poll, which found record low support for gun restrictions. The survey was conducted in October, before the recent series of fatal gun incidents. But the poll did follow other heavily publicized tragedies, such as the 2007 rampage at Virginia Tech University. The 2008 survey found that 29 percent of Americans favored a ban on handguns.
The Gallup analysis noted that was the lowest level of support since the organization first began asking that question 50 years ago. In 1959, at the close of the Eisenhower administration, 60 percent of Americans favored such a ban.
A plurality of those surveyed, 49 percent, did support the general concept of stricter laws covering the sale of firearms. Forty-one percent said such laws should remain as they are and only 8 percent said they should be less strict.
"This contrasts with public opinion in the early 1990s, when the balance of opinion was more than two-to-one in favor of making gun laws more strict," Gallup pointed out in an analysis of the results.
Even at that level, however, the public-opinion balance would seem to favor new restrictions, but that position has gained no legislative traction. Perhaps the biggest reason for that, according to figures on both sides of the debate, is the political heft of the National Rifle Association.
"It goes back to one of the oldest principles in politics -- intensity triumphs over extensity," said Baker, the Rutgers scholar. "If you're looking at the most effective lobbies in Washington, it's not the AARP, with many more members. It's the NRA."
Gallup noted that support for gun restrictions was at its highest in the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, a period of generally higher crime rates when the original Brady bill and the assault-weapons ban were enacted. The political sequel to those measures was the recurring characterization of Democrats as a party that wanted to take people's guns away.
In recent years, the Democratic Party has tried to change that brand. Even Obama, while supporting some gun restrictions, made a repeated point on the campaign trail of emphasizing that he believed that the right to bear arms was an individual right as opposed to one restricted to militia members -- a view subsequently affirmed in the closely watched Supreme Court ruling, District of Columbia v. Heller.
When asked about responses to the recent spate of shootings in a CNN interview this week, Vice President Joe Biden cited recent increased federal funding for police departments, but did not mention any of the gun-control measures at least theoretically supported by his White House.

(E-mail James O'Toole at jotoole(at)post-gazette.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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