Biden getting 51% combined with a 95% correlation between cites for Biden and cites for Senate does not mean that all Dem senators who won by less than 2% will lose. I can’t understand why you would say that, but my best guess is that you’re multiplying Biden’s vote by this correlation to estimate a senator’s vote? That’s not how correlation works. Maybe I’m just not following. If you make this far through the comments I’d be interested in better understanding the math here. Thanks!
The bigger issue for the Democrats is there isn’t an obvious tactical pivot they can make to fix their unpopularity. Their Left leaning base already thinks they’re shills who will sell them out at the first sign of trouble and believes the solution is to pivot left. I don’t think they will buy into a pivot back to the right (meaning the center). On the flip side of the coin I’m not even sure what pivoting the Dems could do to shore up their support among moderate voters in the first place. Democrats have little credibility.
Democrats simultaneously need to sell their left leaning base on a more moderate agenda while also pivoting to the center in order to fend off defections. The problem is the party is awful on earned media attention and staying on message. The Republicans have done a great job portraying the Democrats as leftist extremists, and there are lots of Democrats who unfortunately ARE leftist extremists. Furthermore they get all the attention and drown out any paid for ads the Democrats can get.
The best thing might be for the Democratic Party to split with AOC leading the leftist part and Joe Biden leading the moderate one. That allows the Democrats to portray themselves as a more viable alternative to the leftist extremists. Basically what Eric Zemmour did for Marine Le Pen in the recent French election. The Democrats and the DSA need each other, and unfortunately the DSA is dragging down the Democratic Party. Their message is actively hostile to the voters the Democrats need to win. On the flip side the Dems can’t govern unless the DSA consents.
It’s a bad cycle just like what we see with Orban in Hungary and Netanyahu in Israel. The only solution is to outlast the populist takeover and we can’t do that unless the DSA agrees to put aside its priorities for generic, boring, candidates. We basically need this coalition to persist until 2028, which just isn’t going to happen IMHO.
It doesn’t help that Biden, while having some good political skills himself, is old and not great at messaging. On the bright side in 2020 you could basically read into him whatever you wanted (which let people build him as a vehicle). In 2024 he won’t have that luxury.
"The bigger issue for the Democrats is there isn’t an obvious tactical pivot they can make to fix their unpopularity"
Stop spouting, or even better stop believing woke nonsense like you need to be a biologist to know what a women is.
Also, at least pretend like deficits matter. And understand that trillions of deficit spending combined with trillions of money printing can (and did) cause inflation
Ok drill that down to a 3 second pitch. I don’t think that’s possible. I the problem is the democratic base is not big enough to win on its own and the voters they need to attract are conservative. The Democrats are in a pickle
As a Republican, normally I would hope that the Democrats keep doing what they are doing. But this system REALLY needs two viable competing SANE parties to work properly.
I'm tired of having to pick between the lessor of two evils. On one hand I have a big spending party that thinks you can't tell the difference between a man and women unless you are a biologist. On the other, is the Trump party. WTF is going on, what happened to common sense?
In a way I think they have been. My read is their attempting to legislate big "sweeping" stuff because they're not confident they'll ever get the chance again.
Which would be fine if they actually DO it, but just talking about it is if anything counterproductive. It (or some parts of it) reminds marginal voters of why they do NOT want to support Democrats w/o attracting any who would benefit
The thing is this is all true, but it's sort of too late on the solutions front. This has all been built up over the last six years in the 2016, 2018, and 2020 cycles. To the extent that there were things the Democrats could do to try and mitigate the damage, their hands are greatly tied by a 50-50 senate that is subject to the filibuster and where the majority includes Manchin and Sinema. That's not to say that there aren't things they can do to mitigate the damage, but a bad 2022 cycle is almost locked in at this point. The best hope is recovery in Biden's political fortunes and a really good 2024 cycle.
It's not only having potential losses among sitting Dem senators, but also possibly losing to defeatable Senate Republicans.
The big target is Wisconsin's Ron Johnson who is very unpopular. My question is whether the Democrats are poised to pick up that vulnerable seat. Are they likely to have a good candidate? The favorite right now is the lieutenant governor, Mandela Barnes. I know little about him, other than that he's a Bernie supporter who narrowly won his position in 2018. Is he a good choice for a state like Wisconsin? Is there a more suitable candidate running for the Democratic nomination?
I'd love to hear from any Wisconsin experts here. It would be a shame if the Democrats blew this great opportunity by picking an unsuitable candidate.
Climbing back on my hobby-horse, I'll just note that the weakness of our political parties make any kind of change a very difficult collective action problem.
The "Democrats" are a loose brand/coalition, not any kind of coherent political entity that is capable of coordinated political action when it comes to messaging, policy or setting priorities.
Instead there are a bunch of individual actors and interest groups acting in their narrow interests and trying to argue that success for the party as a whole depends on everyone else in the coalition adopting those narrow interests.
This is also how you get and maintain the structural disadvantage the Democrats currently face. A normal political party would seek to compete in the system as it exists with the goal of being a majority party. What constitutes the Democrat party has no ability to do that. There is no leadership with any authority, much less authority that can force the various factions to play nice for the greater good.
Fundamentally, this is a much bigger problem than the trends discussed in this post and is actually what underlies so much dysfunction in our political parties.
Seeing as you & I've discussed this a bunch- I'm considering becoming a single-issue pundit on the topic of getting rid of primaries. Let parties internally nominate 2-3 candidates each election, then we either use approval voting to pick the winner, or (even better but more convoluted) approval voting leading to a second round faceoff for a raw majority winner. And then, dear Lord, stop primarying *incumbents from your own party, what is the freaking point of doing that America*. It just pushes both parties away from the center to please fanatic primary voters.
Poasting really can change the world. If I just churned out tons of anti-primary content and worked to persuade elites on both the left and the right, I think that's a feasible decade goal- get party elites to get rid of primaries
How are you going to do that when small donor donations still exist and anybody shut out can immediately get attention by saying, truthfully, "the powerful and rich Democratic insiders don't want you to have a voice."
You actually want a left-wing 3rd party to gain consistent voting power? That's how you to do it. Same thing in reverse w/ the GOP.
Yes, I know, other countries do it differently. American's aren't going to care if you tell them, "well, in the UK..."
1. The 2-3 candidates nominated by the party probably have to fairly represent different slices of the party, if they're strong in that particular Congressional district. You probably have to put both a Justice Dem and a centrist/pro-business type on the ballot for a blue district, both a MAGA-type and a country club Republican on the ballot for a red district. Then it's up to the voters which one they want.
2. The US already makes it reasonably difficult for 3rd parties to get on the ballot now, and I'd support making that even tougher
3. If said 3rd party gets enough signatures to get on a ballot (and I do recommend a high number), then they have enough supporters to be taken seriously, and they have to be incorporated in the future re: step 1
4. I (very strongly) support changes to our campaign finance system where donations have to flow to the parties, who then distribute to candidates who play ball. I am extremely opposed to our candidate-driven, 'say the craziest thing possible to get moar donations from ideologues' system that we have at present
On both sides, activists will immediately agree any Justice/MAGA person who agrees to the new rules in the GOP/DNC Isn't really a Justice/MAGA person. I can easily imagine Donald Trump or Tucker Carlson saying, "no true MAGA Republican would agree to the undemocratic elite Establishment deep state primaries the GOP is creating to block the true voice of the Republican voter..'
What you basically want is a way to shut out wide swaths of the population from having any political power because you dislike the way they do politics.
At a certain point, you actually have to let the actual people in your party control whose in charge, no matter how much it may upset you, personally. Hell, in this position, and right now, I'm a Democratic hack who regularly tries to talk my more left-wing friends into understanding the situation the DNC is in, but if this came to pass, I'd openly vote for a 3rd party and tell anybody I know not to vote for the Democrat's because they are a corrupt organization.
For a recent real-life example, I point you to the latest Virginia Republican gubernatorial primary. Party Republicans were concerned that a MAGA crazy would win the nomination & lose the general- so they literally didn't hold a primary, they let party insiders only vote in a virtual convention- the way America worked before the 70s. They picked Youngkin, a pro-business type, and were rewarded with the governorship. Neither Trump nor Carlson had much to say about the process.
"What you basically want is a way to shut out wide swaths of the population from having any political power because you dislike the way they do politics."
What I find interesting is how many Americans don't realize how unique we are. There are 160 democracies on Earth- in 159 of them, the parties control who gets the nomination. There is no other country in the world that has ever let any random person run for their party's offices. Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Denmark, the Nordics, Taiwan.... each and every one either does not hold primaries for political office, or they hold a small one with party-nominated candidates. Just to repeat- no democracy, anywhere, at any time, has ever used American-style primaries where the party can't control who runs for their nomination. We are utterly, utterly unique. (And even then- only since the 70s for our present system).
But if your point is 'it will be extremely difficult/maybe impossible to institute reform'- yes, I agree wholeheartedly. It may not be possible to make the changes I want. I still think it's worth it to try. Reform is always hard! In the meanwhile, I encourage you to learn more about how.... every other democracy on planet Earth works.
Edit to include: to counter the argument that it's undemocratic, here's my counter-argument I would use with the general public (i.e not Substack commenters, but how I'd pitch it to ordinary people). Right now, primaries are typically only made up of one-third of general election voters. It's actually *more* democratic to put every candidate on the ballot and let the *whole population* decide. (Yes it's actually it's less democratic because the parties are controlling the nomination- I think 10% less democracy is a good thing, I wouldn't say that out loud though)
To make a somewhat crass snipe - yes, in the 70's, there were less primaries that locked power away to the elites. Women also couldn't get credit without a signature from a husband or a parent. So, there are a myraid of ways the 70's and before sucked.
But to make a more substantial point, A single gubernatorial primary in an off-year election is different than overturning all congressional and presidential primaries nationwide, plus the convention thing had actual historical precedent in Virginian politics, as opposed to something entirely new to the vast majority of voters.
Also, In most of those other 159 countries, due to the lack of electoral college and other factors, it's much easier to create a competing party if elites within a party lock you out of competing within that party. Even in the UK, with it's two and a half party duopoly, despite never coming close government, both UKIP and the LibDem's have had
The thing you don't mention in your response is you want the worst of both worlds - party elites having basically all power to choose nominees + making it as hard as possible to form a 3rd party.
Give me rule by a fascist chosen democratically over a social democrat imposed by my supposed betters.
I think the difficulty is that primaries were put in place specifically as a tool to disempower party elites. That might make it difficult for the elites to get rid of them.
“But the democratic leadership is the most powerful force on the planet and that’s the only possible reason why my favored candidate didn’t win the nomination in the past two races!” /s
The biggest issue I see with the Democratic Party is branding. On most issues, their points are reasonable... popular... desirable. On the local level, Democrats have plenty of moderate, patriotic candidates, but they don't seem to get the same media coverage as the AOCs of the party.
For instance... I was just in Los Angeles with my Brother and Sister-in-law. They are educated, affluent, west coat liberals (I love them)... they have been talking about buying a house, and my sister in law was telling me how they don't want to buy a house in a neighborhood with "flags" at first I thought she was talking about Trump flags.... but no. She doesn't want to live in a neighborhood with American Flags. Now... she is a Moroccan immigrant, and they have different standards of displaying patriotism. But as a dedicated liberal Democrat, she automatically associates anyone displaying an American flag as "other"
Displaying any kind of patriotism is a red-coded behavior. Relatively normie democrats are uncomfortable with even banal displays of patriotism because it (maybe) portends Trumpist values. This seem bad; Democrats should be able to brand themselves as pro-America.
My parents had the same heuristic in their recent housing search.
Same mistake the left made in the 70s and the 00s, abandoning patriotism to the right. It's absolutely terrible signaling. If you convey a message that only Republicans love America, people who love America will vote for Republicans. In reinforces every stereotype of the leftist sneering at ordinary people.
I had this argument with a teenage nephew who is horrified by the OK sign. If the white nationalists claimed the color blue, would you stop wearing blue? We need to stop abandoning good (and popular) things.
Yes, and on the merits Democrats ought to be proud of America. Some of the best parts of this country's past and present reflect Democratic ideals! There is a reason so many people want to move to America rather than China.
I am a European-born naturalized u.s. citizen with some fairly lofty views, and I approve this message. It makes me sad that patriotism is a dirty word on the Left.
No problem! Was just genuinely curious. I can basically assume the connection anyways but just wanted to make sure I was following. Job's more important!
I find it interesting that even though so many journalists are personally invested in the progressive project, they don't shy away from making journalistic and editorial decisions that actually hurt Democrats. It is not the fault of the Democratic Party that NPR decided to host someone promoting neo-barbarianism, rioting, and pillaging. It is not the fault of the Democratic Party that 60 Minutes aired a deceptively edited, untrue hit piece on Ron DeSantis. Even though it is not true, many Republicans and conservatives view the mainstream media as the comms department of the Democratic Party, so many Republicans believe that anything the mainstream media promotes is the actual view of most Democrats.
I think that is because most journalists and editors think the most progressive ideas are the best... and most popular. Their peer groups are all fellow liberals.
let's not undersell America's thermostatic desire for divided government (not the same as ticket splitting). Assuming the Republicans take both houses of congress in 22, obviously the Democratic agenda will be dead but also it will immediately handicap the Republican presidential candidate in 2024, especially if it's Trump.
The way I interpret the "thermostatic" nature of US politics is this:
Both parties have their flaws and extremists, but it's the problems with the party in power that gets the bulk of the media attention and is what voters focus on. On top of this, the party in power always gets the blame for whatever problems may happen that are beyond anybody's control.
The Republicans have been pushing plenty of extreme policies of their own lately, on everything from guns (open carry without a permit) to abortion (Texas SB 8) to transgender rights (gender-affirming care being considered child abuse) to election administration (cyber ninjas, bills to allow legislatures to overturn election results). Yet, absolutely none of this matters because the focus is all about the problems with the Democrats.
If Republicans sweep to power in 2024, everything will flip. Nobody will remember wokeism or overly cautious COVID rules anymore - this time, the problems with the Republicans will be in the spotlight, and the problems with the Democrats will be ignored, leading to another blue wave election in 2026.
Maybe, but there is precedent in 2008 or 2016 or 2020 for the incumbent President having taken such a heavy beating in the midterms that at the following election, when his party is turfed out of the White House, the other side ends up with Presidency/Senate majority/House majority for the next two years (when it becomes their turn to get beat up). So I would not hold out hope based on thermostatic desire for divided government in 2024, but would hope that in 2026 the law of gravity will kneecap the De Santis administration.
For sure it’s still possible for the R’s to win the presidency in 2024 regardless, but the chances decrease, perhaps significantly, if winning the Presidency means having the trifecta. I’m convinced that if Trump had been leading in the polls in 2016 instead of seeming like a major underdog, the D’s would have won the House and possibly the Senate that election.
I hate describing the Senate or Electoral College as "biased against Democrats". They are just not. The rules about winning in both situations have been clearly defined and Democrats, knowing what it takes to win, have chosen to pursue a suboptimal coalition building strategy.
It gives me flashbacks to being a Timberwolves fan in the Flip Saunders 2.0 era. Amongst the many reasons they lost all the time was shooting by far the least amount of three pointers by choice. The team made a horrible strategic choice and paid for it over and over again. At least with them though, the fans were smart enough to realize that they were shooting themselves in the foot and not blame the league for biasing the game against them by introducing the three pointer decades earlier.
As Democrats, we have no one to blame but ourselves for how difficult we've chosen to make it for us to win.
“Bias” has a perfectly neutral and technical statistical meaning. The electoral college is “biased” in the sense that the median electoral vote is in a state whose party split is several points off of the national party split. Sometimes you want a biased estimator (for instance, your virus test should probably be biased towards false positives rather than false negatives).
"The rules are biased against people who live in cities"
But they're not - assuming you're talking about congress the rules haven't changed much in many decades and the bias is a very recent phenomenon that is heavily impacted by ever-changing population shifts. With the rate of continued urbanization if voting patterns hold constant the bias might actually disappear and reverse within a decade or two. To remove geographic bias you'd have to remove geographic representation.
And if you're talking about the electoral college, the bias is even more temporary and subject to whichever small number of states happen to be the swing states. It used to reliably be Ohio and Florida (not particularly rural) - now it's Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and the upper Midwest. I agree it's not ideal, but it's not "biased against cities".
Because an unrepresentative government is more easily captured by rent seeking, narrow interests. The governments most likely to protect fair, competitive marketplaces are those which are responsible to all citizens equally. See Acemoglu and Robinson's Why Nations Fail for further details.
No of course I wouldn't be fine with that. In fact, I've advocated that the top priority that Dems should have had for their two years in power was to admit Puerto Rico and DC as states, even if PR is going to be more purplish than blue. Anything other than that kind of structural change is going to get washed away.
We are, however, clearly not doing that. And there aren't other real plans to change the rules about the Senate or the EC. Wishing we had another country's electoral system without any plan to move ours to that other system doesn't do anything. Without structural changes, our choices go back to change our coalition building strategy or likely lose.
I was thinking the opposite might save the Dems from an electoral trouncing. That's not so much based on my own preference as it is on my read of the electorate. He seems like someone who can connect with a wide range of voters, including many swing voters and especially blue collar voters. The man has the most blue collar face I've ever seen.
I saw a pretty shocking map the other day that (aside from Texas), every single state gaining college graduates voted for Joe Biden. The West Coast, Minnesota, Colorado, Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey, Maine, Maryland, New York, Mass, Rhode Island and Virginia. So the Senate problem will just get worse and worse as more and more people with means and education leave the conservative states
Also, I don’t think it even matters who wins the Presidency via vote? Republicans we’re very clear with their votes last time that if they control Congress they’re going to install Trump as President whether or not he wins. Nothing about the stupid laws have been fixed, and Republicans have only gotten more unreasonable since then. If it’s all done legally, do we really think Biden and other Democrats have the courage to resist?
If Texas flipped to blue-leaning while all other states stayed their same colors, that would do a large part in reversing the Electoral College disadvantage.
How much of the college grads for Dem stuff is about not liking Republicans and how much is just about Trump? If Romney were the Republican nominee many college grads would go back to the Republican Party. Maybe many white working class peeps would go back to the Dems? I don’t know, but I’m skeptical this is the new normal. Just saying Trump drove a lot if this stuff.
I think Trump drove a lot of it, but since he's almost certainly going to be the Republican nominee in 2024 (absent death or some really severe health event), that means the Democrats need to survive one more round of it before things revert to status quo.
I'll just say that by far the most obvious thing D's could and should have done to bolster their coalition like a decade ago was drop gun control from their agenda. Yes it'll piss off people in states they already won by 30, but it would help them literally everywhere else. It's a high cultural, low practical salience issue. And it's been clear for a while that it's a lost cause in the courts anyways. Sticking behind assault weapon bans, and capacity limits and "ghost gun" hysteria is an all downside proposition that hurts them in exactly the places they need to stop bleeding votes.
These things are generally popular (https://news.gallup.com/poll/1645/guns.aspx). But they're not *wildly* popular and, more to the point, it's impossible for them to pass. That's why I'm okay with the Democrats stating them as part of their principled positions; I just don't want them to lead any more doomed efforts to try to pass them. All that does is infuriate that solid minority bloc of the population that will die on the hill of unlimited gun rights while disappointing people who would like to see more gun control but, outside of the latest horrific slaughter, really doesn't think about it.
The last thing the Democrats should do is reverse their position on guns. No one would believe them, it would pick up no new votes, and would simply prove how they have no principles. Just don't jump up and down about how this time you're really going to do something about it.
Contrast that with "defunding the police." That's wildly unpopular (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/10/police-reform-polls-white-black-crime.html) and the entire Democratic party was getting branded with something that almost all of the leadership opposed. That's why it was brilliant politics of Biden to use the State of the Union to reject that piece of non-popularist idiocy.
Ehhh, even where you can get small majority preference, it's an issue where the level of voter investment is wildly biased towards the 2A camp. And you can't escape the geography problem, the voters you lose being anti gun are votes you really need and the votes you lose by respecting gun rights are votes you can afford to lose.
I would also add that this is an area where most left-of-center people, myself included, don't have any lived experience because we don't own guns. One of my closest friends is a conservative Republican, now in the military, for whom gun rights are a top voting issue, and a point he always made to me was that he felt frustrated by liberals who objectively knew less about guns that he did telling him that his views were wrong.
"Know less but lecture me" is an extremely common frustration. I constantly have to point out that machine guns are already basically illegal, most gun deaths in the US are suicides, the "gun show loophole" isn't about gun shows, so on. More than any other issue I can think of, there is a massive information asymmetry on gun control: the median democrat knows almost nothing about gun laws except that they want more.
I'm a fairly centrist technocrat type who wants to keep firearms legal, and I would be much more open to voting Dem if they would drop the attempts to restrict firearms. I feel like having me voting for a carbon tax and legal abortion in a purplish state is more valuable than running up the vote count in Massachusetts.
What I find frustrating about the Gun Rights debate is Gun Rights activists want the debate to be about the details, while Gun Rights opponents argue on moral and emotional grounds. Everyone agrees on the emotion (well, almost everyone) but then the debate shifts to "the details" and it becomes a stupid muddled mess.
Personally I find the Gun Rights arguments to be specious. The US has far more gun deaths than the rest of the industrialized world, and the reason is obvious: we're ALSO an outlier in gun rights. So the answer to me is obvious, but I see no path forward currently.
Specifically, with regard to the steps Biden/ATF announced yesterday, steps that overwhelmingly target firearm enthusiast/hobbyists being taken as a reflexive "anti-crime" effort is embarrassingly disconnected from anything that will actually impact levels of violence and extremely insulting to the sorts of people with personal experience assembling home built guns.
I agree here as well - I think any real reform we're going to get in this country at a national level, it's going to come from gun owners / pro-gun politicians leading the way. It was a conservative Australia PM led the charge on pretty radical gun reform after they saw a horrific school shooting.
I think Manchin and Toomey showed real leadership here - they tried in 2013 after the Newtown tragedy - they were bipartisan "A rated" NRA members with rural constituents who said it was time for common sense reform. I thought it was worth the attempt then, they got 54 votes. But until we think we can get that close and have bipartisan support for a bill, I don't think it's worth drawing attention to doomed efforts that will hurt electorally.
I am sympathetic to this in some ways, but less in others. Sure liberals may not know what ‘actually’ constitutes an assault rifle, but the more important knowledge is knowing handguns are far more likely than long rifles to be used in crimes.
Most gun deaths are suicides, yet it’s not a big political issue. The gun rights debate has fell off so far from reality it’s barely worth engaging in anymore. But I don’t think giving up on gun rights will help Democrats much.
handguns are far more likely than long rifles (or assault rifles) to be used in crimes (or suicide) but no one is actually arguing to get rid of handguns because of their use as a home defense tool. Maybe handgun abolishment is the secret goal--many gun supporters are suspicious--but no one is advocating for that. So, people on the right see a lot of virtue signaling in left proposals that won't have any public safety impact but will impact their ability to enjoy shooting guns they enjoy having.
"Democrats believe that we can reduce gun violence while respecting the rights of responsible gun owners. We believe we should expand and strengthen background checks for those who want to purchase a firearm – because it shouldn’t be easier to get a gun than a driver’s license. We believe we should ensure that guns don’t fall into the hands of terrorists (whether they be domestic or foreign), domestic abusers, other violent criminals, or those who have shown signs of danger toward themselves or others. And we believe we should treat gun violence as the deadly public health crisis it is." (https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/the-issues/preventing-gun-violence/)
If the Democratic party and its nominee had entirely dropped all that verbiage from its materials and just said nothing, how many more votes would they have gotten. Very very few, I'd say.
The Biden DoJ/ATF are literally announcing plans trying to redefine a firearm receiver today. They're also moving to redefine tens of thousands of braced "pistols" as short barreled rifles in a move that would make thousands of people felons because ATF thinks it has the power to arbitrarily redefine the law. None of these moves will impact gun violence. It's simply culture war bullshit criminalizing gun owners.
They dropped the proposed pistol brace/SBR rule man. They proposed it, then they dropped it when they encountered pushback.
As a very pro-gun guy who owns multiple ARs (hell I own an AR pistol with a brace that would've been affected by Biden's withdrawn rule), I don't even understand what the argument would be against requiring a stamped serial number on a lower. Like, are there are any gun restrictions you're OK with? We'll allow fully automatic weapons to be sold freely again? Explosives? How about barring firearm sales to felons, you OK with that one?
The pistol brace rule is dead? Hope it stays that way.
The whole "ghost gun" thing is a wildly dumb red herring. Just doesn't matter. Just trying to make shit sound scary to no useful end. Presumably the goal of the new rulemaking is to roadblock the availability of 80 percent lowers and various parts, again with the only meaningful outcome being an assault on gun owners wallets.
The actual rule just released is far too long for me to possibly parse all the implications at this moment. The most objectionable bit is ATF's penchant for claiming to have the power to simply redefine people into being felons.
I do happen to think there's probably room for a coherent, comprehensive federal gun control compromise that respects the 2A, but everyone would hate it and the politicians would rather have the issue than a resolution.
The Democrats' agenda, in this sense, is the most radical thing that any vaguely serious person in the party said and didn't receive massive pushback for. Beto O'Rourke (pretty much the definition of "vaguely serious") said "Hell yes, we are going to take your AR-15". and he didn't get the shocked demands he take it back that, say, Ilhan Omar got when she used anti-semitic tropes against Israel.
If someone says something and they don't get dogpiled for it, then the party gets tagged with it. That's why the Republican lack of pushback against MTG is so damning - if the Kevin McCarthys and Mitch McConnells of this world were aggressively pushing back the way they did to Madison Cawthorn about the sex and drugs stuff, then it would be treated as a fringe position. But they don't, they just ignore it, and that is (not unreasonably) seen as meaning that even moderate members of the party are either OK with it or secretly support it - apart from individuals who do their own pushback, like Romney and Collins.
Beto O'Rourke dropped out of the presidential campaign on Nov. 1, 2019. He was a total non-entity in the Democratic race. It's not the job of leaders of the Democratic party to comment on every stupid comment made by second or third tier candidates.
I'd like to see evidence how their silence on MTG is hurting Republicans (among whom?) but while she's not a leader of the party, she's a hell of a fund raiser.
I'm not saying that the *image* of the Democrats -- and the intense policy positions of many of them -- are strongly pro-gun control, just that if you look at what the party as a whole and the leadership says, it's not crazy stuff and that dropping that would not likely help them.
I'm saying that if you have an image of being strongly pro-gun control, then you have to say things that counter that. And if you want to do that without sounding like an obviously fake pro-gun person, then your best opportunity is to jump on a prominent national Democrat who has taken a position much more hostile to guns than the Democratic consensus - because you can do that without sounding like an NRA stooge.
I agree Democrats have a lot less room for error. Trump, at an event centering on gun control while he was POTUS, said he favored confiscating guns from suspected bad actors before any due process. Imagine if Obama had thrown that out there. There was no real blowback for Trump saying that, or other anti-gun things (bump stock regulation - restricting gun rights passed in 2018!) from the pro-gun voters - because they know the GOP is firmly in line with the NRA.
Sure I can see that. Just regarding O'Rourke though, that would not have worked back in the fall of 2019 when no one other than Democrats (and trolling Republicans) were paying attention to the primary debate.
I agree. I'm passionate about gun control but can see it's clearly doing a lot of harm politically and not achieving what it hopes to on the national level. There's a lot you can accomplish more quietly at a state level.
Obama was fairly close to this from 2008-2012; he actually *expanded* gun rights in office (permitting guns on Amtrak) in that first term. The NRA and gun lobby will still convince millions of people that Democrats are just waiting to snatch guns away even if they drop gun control from the agenda, but maybe some voters will be persuadable.
The issue with moderate Democrats is they a. say sincerely that they don't want to take away peoples guns, then a fellow Dem comes out and says... yes that is the goal. Or b.. they actually say they want to take away guns (Beto).
Gun control is one issue that I rarely see anyone address.
The most public gun control platform issues are the ones that are the least efficient. Universal Background Checks (gun show loophole)... this wouldn't make a dent in the gun murders in the U.S. (I support it anyway... just realistic about its impact)
The things that would work... harsher penalties/longer sentences for people who commit crimes with guns would result in a huge disparate impact issue.
A huge percentage of murders are committed by people who have previous gun possession convictions.
Now most gun owners... vast majority are law abiding, but also aware of these statistics. There is a cultural punishment angle to the public gun control discussion.
Disclaimer: I own multiple weapons. All kept in a safe.
I haven't looked into it much but I like the idea of requiring liability insurance for people seeking license to carry - I think IL is pursuing this right now.
Discounts for people with gun safes, safety training courses completed, military/police, record of safety. But if you're Dick Cheney and you shot a guy in the face on accident...you're either uninsurable or should have sky high premiums.
People with carry licenses don't commit crime. They're like the statistically most law abiding demographic in the country. This sort of suggestion is exactly the worst thing D's do. Proposals that entirely burden the most law abiding set of gun owners while doing absolutely nothing to constrain violence or crime are wildly alienating and blare out the ignorance of people who have no personal experience navigating the existing gun law environment in the country.
"People with carry licenses don't commit crime." - pretty bold statement to say members of any group 'don't commit crime', also pretty easy to debunk - https://concealedcarrykillers.org/
That's a bold claim - any evidence you can share that it would have zero impact?
As discussed here, we know 'gun violence' is a lot more than just the high profile mass shooting. A large part is suicides. A small but still tragically high number are kids playing with unsecured weapons. If gun liability nudged people to have safer gun habits, you're certain it would have zero lives saved?
We also just have a lot of knuckleheads do stupid things with guns that might not kill anyone, but I would still like to see them paying high premiums, the same way terrible drivers should pay higher premiums on their car insurance. Consider the FBI agent who shot someone by accident because he did a flip on a dance floor at a wedding. That was really dumb and could have killed someone. I don't think he needs to face the most extreme punishment, but a gun liability law could make sure his record with a grossly negligent incident is reflected in his gun liability rates should he still want to carry a gun in his personal life.
I mean is there any reason to believe that the subset of negligent/accidental firearm injuries is on a scale anything remotely like cars? Let alone the danger posed to persons other than oneself? How many people actually pull a Dick Cheney? I'm gonna guess there's a laundry list of things like pools, bicycles, trampolines, scooters etc. Etc. That pose a similar risk.
It is absolutely true that effective gun control can lower gun crime, but it does so not by keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, but by keeping guns out of everyone (so the criminals can't steal them or pretend to be non-criminals), and the scale of the regulation that would be needed to have any effective impact in the US is way beyond the politically possible - and the inevitable failure of any policy that is politically possible will just discredit gun control.
I'd love to see Democratic politicians going to gun-control lobby groups and saying "regulations could stop children being murdered in schools, but voters won't vote for them. Go and convince white Christians in rural areas to demand gun control and I'll pass the policies you like: but stop campaigning in Democratic primaries, because all you are doing is picking people who lose to Republicans".
An actual effective gun control scheme would basically be a blanket ban of every firearm designed in the last 125 years. Like, the lethality gap in firing into a crowd with an 1897 shotgun vs a 2021 AR-15 is really not very significant.
Well, yes, but that's clearly the goal of some people from the occasional gaspingly hysterical mention in news report about guns that let you fire a bullet each time you pull the trigger, i.e., a semi-automatic weapon of the sort that's existed since the late 19th Century (and have made up a majority of new handgun sales for a few decades now, I believe).
UK law bans all handguns (defined as shorter than 24") and all semi-automatic and automatic weapons.
The most powerful gun that is licensable and anything resembling common is an SMLE (Short, Magazine Lee-Enfield), ie the rifle used by the British Army in the two World Wars.
Yes, I'm aware that the UK has much more restrictive gun control laws than the US (as do many other countries), but I don't see the connection to my comment?
UK firearms law says that the only firearms that normal people can have are muzzle-loaders (no licence required) and shotguns (SGC, much simpler licence) that have to be broken open to reload and may have no more than three barrels.
Rifles that are not self-loading (ie semi-automatic) can be licensed (also semi-autos in .22LR), but getting a licence is pretty arduous - and you have to license each gun separately, so large collections are always illegal. There are just over 100,000 such licenses (guns, not persons) in the UK - about 1 per 600 persons.
Pistols (guns shorter than 24" or with a barrel under 12") are wholly illegal for private use and cannot be licensed; some manufacturers make very long pistols specifically so competition shooters can use them. There are some exceptions for elite-level sporting events (e.g. the 2012 Olympics had one)
Ammunition cannot be legally sold without a firearms licence, other than black powder.
The net effect is that criminals mostly can't get guns. Armed robberies frequently involve replica firearms because the criminals can't get real ones. Even when they can, they are often deeply unreliable, especially the massive jam tendencies in badly made/badly repaired semi-automatics.
Sure, but this is wildly beyond the scope of the Overton window of "common sense gun control" bullshit the D's waste their political capital getting behind.
Absolutely, which was my argument: either you do something actually effective, or you do something politically effective (ie shut up about guns).
That's why I suggested supporting the NRA definition of what the second amendment means and also supporting repeal: "I want to restrict guns; it's unconstitutional to do it, that's why I want to repeal the second amendment. Until it is repealed, gun restrictions are unconstitutional and I will vote against breaking the constitution".
Aside: unlike drugs, gun manufacturing and concealment is hard enough that if no-one is allowed to make or carry a gun, then it can be effectively enforced to the point that even criminals can't get guns.
Now, the US would have the problem that it has lots of guns already and you'd have to remove them all, but if you had the political consensus necessary to pass such laws, then the vast majority of gun owners would voluntarily give up their guns. The fact that that last sentence is laughable is why a political campaign to get rid of guns won't get off the ground.
A Democrat could perhaps get around it by a "no half measures on guns, repeal the second amendment or nothing" position - knowing that gun owners will recognise that second amendment repeal is going nowhere and therefore the substance of this person's position is "nothing" - especially if they then vote against gun control measures.
2nd Amendment advocates would take you seriously...if not literally. They are scared of the smallest 2nd amendment rollback. They aren't going to take "a full repeal or nothing" argument like "oh, he means nothing." A republican would just respond "nothing". Then who would they side with? the guy threatening repeal or nothing...or the guy saying nothing?
I'm talking about the difficulty of getting a gun in a country with an effective national gun ban, like the UK. Not about getting a gun as a criminal in a country where large numbers of non-criminals have guns.
It's certainly true that a 3D printed gun is an option, though pure 3D-printed receivers are still pretty poor unless you use 3D printers that can print in metal, which are still much too expensive for criminal use. If RocketLab can print a rocket engine in metal on a 3D printer, then I'm sure the same printer can print a receiver - but those are multi-million dollar machines, not really in the price range for a criminal. Now, CNC milling is a completely different story, but it's a question of how many CNC millers are prepared to associate themselves with violent criminal gangs - regardless of how much money they are offered. Still, I'll concede that this is getting much closer to being possible.
But where are you getting the ammunition?
I have fired a legally-owned SMLE here in the UK (it belonged to an acquaintance and was on a licensed range). Without a firearms certificate, I can't legally buy ammunition. Legally-owned ammunition is well-secured, and stealing it would result in a major police alert to track it down and retrieve it.
I can probably get hold of used brass. I could pour lead for the bullets, though making FMJ would be harder (not impossible, though). But nitrocellulose is a really hard problem. Powder is controlled the same as ammunition, so I'd probably have to make it myself. Nitric acid at the levels of concentration needed is a controlled substance, though you could probably steal some from a chemical plant - and cellulose is trivial; cotton is never going to be a controlled substance.
But making powder is notoriously dangerous, this isn't like a meth lab. Get it wrong, and you blow yourself up, and the people who know enough of how to do it to ever produce anything useful know how dangerous it is. You need permanent facilities, which are hard to hide, you need to be able to survive the occasional accidental explosion, which is going to attract attention. And I know I wouldn't trust the quality control enough to put it in a gun I was firing.
Hand casting bullets is absolutely a thing, and nowhere near as dangerous or difficult as you imagine here. There's an entire hobby industry here in the US devoted to enthusiasts hand casting their own bullets. I bet you the number of rounds hand-casted here in the US yesterday was in the four figures- just guys working in their garage or basement. I recommend poking around Youtube for some American redneck hand-casting how-tos
I didn't suggest that hand-casting bullets was difficult at all: "I could pour lead for the bullets, though making FMJ would be harder".
It's guncotton - nitrocellulose - that is a pain to make. You need strong nitric acid, you need to keep it cool, it takes a long time, and the safe way to do it is in very small batches, 24 hours or more for a batch that might be enough to fill a single AR-15 magazine's worth of rounds.
And primers are even worse. The chemistry is nastier, and primary explosives are shock-sensitive.
Hand casters tend to buy powder, not make it - and you'd have to be cracked to make your own primers. Primer factories - modern ones with all sorts of safety options that no-one has access to at home - still blow up occasionally. If criminal gangs had chemists making primers in secret labs the way that they have meth labs and crack labs, then we'd know about it, because of all the random explosions.
It's not 3D printing- this is a common misconception- it's CNC machining (which actually makes it worse, because there's probably 10 million CNC machines across the US, in every machine shop)
3D printing is a very viable means of acquiring a firearm. US laws only consider the serialized part to be a "firearm" and allow all other parts to be bought without a background check. For weapons where the receiver just holds the rest of the parts together and doesn't handle much stress it's pretty easy to print the receiver. Once you have a printed receiver you can buy OEM parts to finish it off and have them delivered to your door. There are a few guys doing AR-15 lowers and AWCY has released a 3d printed receiver for the CZ Scorpion Pistol Caliber Carbine.
Either process works. Fully 3d printed semiautomatic carbines with electrochemically rifled barrels are entirely attainable for the average handyman/hobbyist (notably the FGC-9). If you allow purchasing of unregulated metal parts, AR/AK pattern rifles and many pistol/PDW designs are also doable.
CNC will get you anything else, but the low bar is 3D printing, which is much more affordable and low skill than CNC.
Most of what you've written here is incorrect. There is no 3D printing process for a metal receiver yet. There are easily 10-20 million guys in America who can operate a CNC machine, and the new Ghost Gunner CNC machines require zero skill, just a laptop. There are no 3D printed firearms yet except for extremely goofy, plastic, single-shot ones. I think you have the basic facts right but you've confused CNC with 3D
All "possession" crimes are trash and ripe for abuse. Throwing thousands of people in jail for being found to have a gun is a terrible fucking alternative to solving actual crimes.
And just to expand on that (or make express what you implied), even if not a single Democrat running for or elected to a federal office mentioned gun control for two years, the issue can and would still hurt Dems among rural voters. People hear "New York Democrats move to add additional restrictions on gun ownership" and they do not readily conclude that this is limited to only one state's Democratic party, and only in that state's legislature. It is hard to shed a national brand that is the result of thousand of politicians' choices and concerted RW media effort to make sure negative aspects of the brand relationship stick.
“…they do not readily conclude that this is limited to only one state's Democratic party, and only in that state's legislature”
Because it’s not only in one state, it’s in basically every single state under the control of the Democratic Party. If I drive from Florida to Maine I can legally carry a loaded pistol with me - on my person or accessible from the driver’s seat in FL, GA, SC, NA, and VA. But in order to comply with the law, before entering DC I would have to unload the pistol, lock it in a box, lock the ammunition in a separate box, and store those boxes in the trunk of the car or in a place not readily accessible from the passenger are of an SUV. Those same requirements have to be followed in MD, DE, PA, NJ, NY, CT, and MA.
(Once I get across the NH border, however, it’s lock & load time, because, Live Free or Die!)
I was making a point about how peoples' perception of a political party's platform is leaky across state borders even when not warranted. I agree that, as to this issue, the reality is that the party is consistently and correctly identified as pro gun control across many, if not all, states.
There was a time where it really seemed like it might get devolved out of the platform. Seemed like people realized it was a losing issue. Then Obama made his infamous "cling to their bibles and guns" comment and it's been a stone on the party's neck ever since. Maybe the tactically dumbest thing he ever said.
Biden getting 51% combined with a 95% correlation between cites for Biden and cites for Senate does not mean that all Dem senators who won by less than 2% will lose. I can’t understand why you would say that, but my best guess is that you’re multiplying Biden’s vote by this correlation to estimate a senator’s vote? That’s not how correlation works. Maybe I’m just not following. If you make this far through the comments I’d be interested in better understanding the math here. Thanks!
The bigger issue for the Democrats is there isn’t an obvious tactical pivot they can make to fix their unpopularity. Their Left leaning base already thinks they’re shills who will sell them out at the first sign of trouble and believes the solution is to pivot left. I don’t think they will buy into a pivot back to the right (meaning the center). On the flip side of the coin I’m not even sure what pivoting the Dems could do to shore up their support among moderate voters in the first place. Democrats have little credibility.
Democrats simultaneously need to sell their left leaning base on a more moderate agenda while also pivoting to the center in order to fend off defections. The problem is the party is awful on earned media attention and staying on message. The Republicans have done a great job portraying the Democrats as leftist extremists, and there are lots of Democrats who unfortunately ARE leftist extremists. Furthermore they get all the attention and drown out any paid for ads the Democrats can get.
The best thing might be for the Democratic Party to split with AOC leading the leftist part and Joe Biden leading the moderate one. That allows the Democrats to portray themselves as a more viable alternative to the leftist extremists. Basically what Eric Zemmour did for Marine Le Pen in the recent French election. The Democrats and the DSA need each other, and unfortunately the DSA is dragging down the Democratic Party. Their message is actively hostile to the voters the Democrats need to win. On the flip side the Dems can’t govern unless the DSA consents.
It’s a bad cycle just like what we see with Orban in Hungary and Netanyahu in Israel. The only solution is to outlast the populist takeover and we can’t do that unless the DSA agrees to put aside its priorities for generic, boring, candidates. We basically need this coalition to persist until 2028, which just isn’t going to happen IMHO.
It doesn’t help that Biden, while having some good political skills himself, is old and not great at messaging. On the bright side in 2020 you could basically read into him whatever you wanted (which let people build him as a vehicle). In 2024 he won’t have that luxury.
>On the flip side the Dems can’t govern unless the DSA consents.
Uh, yeah they can.
Member of the DSA would eliminate governing majorities in both chambers of Congress so no they can't
"The bigger issue for the Democrats is there isn’t an obvious tactical pivot they can make to fix their unpopularity"
Stop spouting, or even better stop believing woke nonsense like you need to be a biologist to know what a women is.
Also, at least pretend like deficits matter. And understand that trillions of deficit spending combined with trillions of money printing can (and did) cause inflation
Ok drill that down to a 3 second pitch. I don’t think that’s possible. I the problem is the democratic base is not big enough to win on its own and the voters they need to attract are conservative. The Democrats are in a pickle
As a Republican, normally I would hope that the Democrats keep doing what they are doing. But this system REALLY needs two viable competing SANE parties to work properly.
I'm tired of having to pick between the lessor of two evils. On one hand I have a big spending party that thinks you can't tell the difference between a man and women unless you are a biologist. On the other, is the Trump party. WTF is going on, what happened to common sense?
Thanks for the piece Simon.
Is there evidence that betting markets provide meaningful predictions of political outcomes? I am a bit skeptical.
I'm not sure if this is conclusive one way or the other but it's a good overview: https://daily.jstor.org/how-accurate-are-prediction-markets/
All very true, but obvious from the narrow Senate win [?] in 2020. Why have Democrats in Congress been acting as if this is not the case?
In a way I think they have been. My read is their attempting to legislate big "sweeping" stuff because they're not confident they'll ever get the chance again.
Which would be fine if they actually DO it, but just talking about it is if anything counterproductive. It (or some parts of it) reminds marginal voters of why they do NOT want to support Democrats w/o attracting any who would benefit
The thing is this is all true, but it's sort of too late on the solutions front. This has all been built up over the last six years in the 2016, 2018, and 2020 cycles. To the extent that there were things the Democrats could do to try and mitigate the damage, their hands are greatly tied by a 50-50 senate that is subject to the filibuster and where the majority includes Manchin and Sinema. That's not to say that there aren't things they can do to mitigate the damage, but a bad 2022 cycle is almost locked in at this point. The best hope is recovery in Biden's political fortunes and a really good 2024 cycle.
It's not only having potential losses among sitting Dem senators, but also possibly losing to defeatable Senate Republicans.
The big target is Wisconsin's Ron Johnson who is very unpopular. My question is whether the Democrats are poised to pick up that vulnerable seat. Are they likely to have a good candidate? The favorite right now is the lieutenant governor, Mandela Barnes. I know little about him, other than that he's a Bernie supporter who narrowly won his position in 2018. Is he a good choice for a state like Wisconsin? Is there a more suitable candidate running for the Democratic nomination?
I'd love to hear from any Wisconsin experts here. It would be a shame if the Democrats blew this great opportunity by picking an unsuitable candidate.
Climbing back on my hobby-horse, I'll just note that the weakness of our political parties make any kind of change a very difficult collective action problem.
The "Democrats" are a loose brand/coalition, not any kind of coherent political entity that is capable of coordinated political action when it comes to messaging, policy or setting priorities.
Instead there are a bunch of individual actors and interest groups acting in their narrow interests and trying to argue that success for the party as a whole depends on everyone else in the coalition adopting those narrow interests.
This is also how you get and maintain the structural disadvantage the Democrats currently face. A normal political party would seek to compete in the system as it exists with the goal of being a majority party. What constitutes the Democrat party has no ability to do that. There is no leadership with any authority, much less authority that can force the various factions to play nice for the greater good.
Fundamentally, this is a much bigger problem than the trends discussed in this post and is actually what underlies so much dysfunction in our political parties.
Seeing as you & I've discussed this a bunch- I'm considering becoming a single-issue pundit on the topic of getting rid of primaries. Let parties internally nominate 2-3 candidates each election, then we either use approval voting to pick the winner, or (even better but more convoluted) approval voting leading to a second round faceoff for a raw majority winner. And then, dear Lord, stop primarying *incumbents from your own party, what is the freaking point of doing that America*. It just pushes both parties away from the center to please fanatic primary voters.
Poasting really can change the world. If I just churned out tons of anti-primary content and worked to persuade elites on both the left and the right, I think that's a feasible decade goal- get party elites to get rid of primaries
How are you going to do that when small donor donations still exist and anybody shut out can immediately get attention by saying, truthfully, "the powerful and rich Democratic insiders don't want you to have a voice."
You actually want a left-wing 3rd party to gain consistent voting power? That's how you to do it. Same thing in reverse w/ the GOP.
Yes, I know, other countries do it differently. American's aren't going to care if you tell them, "well, in the UK..."
1. The 2-3 candidates nominated by the party probably have to fairly represent different slices of the party, if they're strong in that particular Congressional district. You probably have to put both a Justice Dem and a centrist/pro-business type on the ballot for a blue district, both a MAGA-type and a country club Republican on the ballot for a red district. Then it's up to the voters which one they want.
2. The US already makes it reasonably difficult for 3rd parties to get on the ballot now, and I'd support making that even tougher
3. If said 3rd party gets enough signatures to get on a ballot (and I do recommend a high number), then they have enough supporters to be taken seriously, and they have to be incorporated in the future re: step 1
4. I (very strongly) support changes to our campaign finance system where donations have to flow to the parties, who then distribute to candidates who play ball. I am extremely opposed to our candidate-driven, 'say the craziest thing possible to get moar donations from ideologues' system that we have at present
On both sides, activists will immediately agree any Justice/MAGA person who agrees to the new rules in the GOP/DNC Isn't really a Justice/MAGA person. I can easily imagine Donald Trump or Tucker Carlson saying, "no true MAGA Republican would agree to the undemocratic elite Establishment deep state primaries the GOP is creating to block the true voice of the Republican voter..'
What you basically want is a way to shut out wide swaths of the population from having any political power because you dislike the way they do politics.
At a certain point, you actually have to let the actual people in your party control whose in charge, no matter how much it may upset you, personally. Hell, in this position, and right now, I'm a Democratic hack who regularly tries to talk my more left-wing friends into understanding the situation the DNC is in, but if this came to pass, I'd openly vote for a 3rd party and tell anybody I know not to vote for the Democrat's because they are a corrupt organization.
Thankfully, it never will.
"Thankfully, it never will."
For a recent real-life example, I point you to the latest Virginia Republican gubernatorial primary. Party Republicans were concerned that a MAGA crazy would win the nomination & lose the general- so they literally didn't hold a primary, they let party insiders only vote in a virtual convention- the way America worked before the 70s. They picked Youngkin, a pro-business type, and were rewarded with the governorship. Neither Trump nor Carlson had much to say about the process.
"What you basically want is a way to shut out wide swaths of the population from having any political power because you dislike the way they do politics."
What I find interesting is how many Americans don't realize how unique we are. There are 160 democracies on Earth- in 159 of them, the parties control who gets the nomination. There is no other country in the world that has ever let any random person run for their party's offices. Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Denmark, the Nordics, Taiwan.... each and every one either does not hold primaries for political office, or they hold a small one with party-nominated candidates. Just to repeat- no democracy, anywhere, at any time, has ever used American-style primaries where the party can't control who runs for their nomination. We are utterly, utterly unique. (And even then- only since the 70s for our present system).
But if your point is 'it will be extremely difficult/maybe impossible to institute reform'- yes, I agree wholeheartedly. It may not be possible to make the changes I want. I still think it's worth it to try. Reform is always hard! In the meanwhile, I encourage you to learn more about how.... every other democracy on planet Earth works.
Edit to include: to counter the argument that it's undemocratic, here's my counter-argument I would use with the general public (i.e not Substack commenters, but how I'd pitch it to ordinary people). Right now, primaries are typically only made up of one-third of general election voters. It's actually *more* democratic to put every candidate on the ballot and let the *whole population* decide. (Yes it's actually it's less democratic because the parties are controlling the nomination- I think 10% less democracy is a good thing, I wouldn't say that out loud though)
To make a somewhat crass snipe - yes, in the 70's, there were less primaries that locked power away to the elites. Women also couldn't get credit without a signature from a husband or a parent. So, there are a myraid of ways the 70's and before sucked.
But to make a more substantial point, A single gubernatorial primary in an off-year election is different than overturning all congressional and presidential primaries nationwide, plus the convention thing had actual historical precedent in Virginian politics, as opposed to something entirely new to the vast majority of voters.
Also, In most of those other 159 countries, due to the lack of electoral college and other factors, it's much easier to create a competing party if elites within a party lock you out of competing within that party. Even in the UK, with it's two and a half party duopoly, despite never coming close government, both UKIP and the LibDem's have had
The thing you don't mention in your response is you want the worst of both worlds - party elites having basically all power to choose nominees + making it as hard as possible to form a 3rd party.
Give me rule by a fascist chosen democratically over a social democrat imposed by my supposed betters.
I think the difficulty is that primaries were put in place specifically as a tool to disempower party elites. That might make it difficult for the elites to get rid of them.
“But the democratic leadership is the most powerful force on the planet and that’s the only possible reason why my favored candidate didn’t win the nomination in the past two races!” /s
The biggest issue I see with the Democratic Party is branding. On most issues, their points are reasonable... popular... desirable. On the local level, Democrats have plenty of moderate, patriotic candidates, but they don't seem to get the same media coverage as the AOCs of the party.
For instance... I was just in Los Angeles with my Brother and Sister-in-law. They are educated, affluent, west coat liberals (I love them)... they have been talking about buying a house, and my sister in law was telling me how they don't want to buy a house in a neighborhood with "flags" at first I thought she was talking about Trump flags.... but no. She doesn't want to live in a neighborhood with American Flags. Now... she is a Moroccan immigrant, and they have different standards of displaying patriotism. But as a dedicated liberal Democrat, she automatically associates anyone displaying an American flag as "other"
Note: I love her and we have great conversations.
Rory I don't see how your two paragraphs are tied together? What's the connection between your first point and your sister-in-law?
I might just be dense, but I missed it, whatever it was.
Displaying any kind of patriotism is a red-coded behavior. Relatively normie democrats are uncomfortable with even banal displays of patriotism because it (maybe) portends Trumpist values. This seem bad; Democrats should be able to brand themselves as pro-America.
My parents had the same heuristic in their recent housing search.
Same mistake the left made in the 70s and the 00s, abandoning patriotism to the right. It's absolutely terrible signaling. If you convey a message that only Republicans love America, people who love America will vote for Republicans. In reinforces every stereotype of the leftist sneering at ordinary people.
I had this argument with a teenage nephew who is horrified by the OK sign. If the white nationalists claimed the color blue, would you stop wearing blue? We need to stop abandoning good (and popular) things.
It really surprised me. I live in a pretty moderate blue city (Boise), and I see plenty of flag flying democrats.
When you give up displays of patriotism as signaling... you are losing.
Yes, and on the merits Democrats ought to be proud of America. Some of the best parts of this country's past and present reflect Democratic ideals! There is a reason so many people want to move to America rather than China.
I am a European-born naturalized u.s. citizen with some fairly lofty views, and I approve this message. It makes me sad that patriotism is a dirty word on the Left.
Typo: lefty not lofty
Exactly!
Nothing really, except obliquely. Not my best comment, but Im at a busy job.
No problem! Was just genuinely curious. I can basically assume the connection anyways but just wanted to make sure I was following. Job's more important!
I find it interesting that even though so many journalists are personally invested in the progressive project, they don't shy away from making journalistic and editorial decisions that actually hurt Democrats. It is not the fault of the Democratic Party that NPR decided to host someone promoting neo-barbarianism, rioting, and pillaging. It is not the fault of the Democratic Party that 60 Minutes aired a deceptively edited, untrue hit piece on Ron DeSantis. Even though it is not true, many Republicans and conservatives view the mainstream media as the comms department of the Democratic Party, so many Republicans believe that anything the mainstream media promotes is the actual view of most Democrats.
I think that is because most journalists and editors think the most progressive ideas are the best... and most popular. Their peer groups are all fellow liberals.
let's not undersell America's thermostatic desire for divided government (not the same as ticket splitting). Assuming the Republicans take both houses of congress in 22, obviously the Democratic agenda will be dead but also it will immediately handicap the Republican presidential candidate in 2024, especially if it's Trump.
The way I interpret the "thermostatic" nature of US politics is this:
Both parties have their flaws and extremists, but it's the problems with the party in power that gets the bulk of the media attention and is what voters focus on. On top of this, the party in power always gets the blame for whatever problems may happen that are beyond anybody's control.
The Republicans have been pushing plenty of extreme policies of their own lately, on everything from guns (open carry without a permit) to abortion (Texas SB 8) to transgender rights (gender-affirming care being considered child abuse) to election administration (cyber ninjas, bills to allow legislatures to overturn election results). Yet, absolutely none of this matters because the focus is all about the problems with the Democrats.
If Republicans sweep to power in 2024, everything will flip. Nobody will remember wokeism or overly cautious COVID rules anymore - this time, the problems with the Republicans will be in the spotlight, and the problems with the Democrats will be ignored, leading to another blue wave election in 2026.
Maybe, but there is precedent in 2008 or 2016 or 2020 for the incumbent President having taken such a heavy beating in the midterms that at the following election, when his party is turfed out of the White House, the other side ends up with Presidency/Senate majority/House majority for the next two years (when it becomes their turn to get beat up). So I would not hold out hope based on thermostatic desire for divided government in 2024, but would hope that in 2026 the law of gravity will kneecap the De Santis administration.
For sure it’s still possible for the R’s to win the presidency in 2024 regardless, but the chances decrease, perhaps significantly, if winning the Presidency means having the trifecta. I’m convinced that if Trump had been leading in the polls in 2016 instead of seeming like a major underdog, the D’s would have won the House and possibly the Senate that election.
I’m tired of these articles spelling doom for Democrats in the coming decade. Yes, hope is not a plan. So come up with a plan! It’s not that easy.
I hate describing the Senate or Electoral College as "biased against Democrats". They are just not. The rules about winning in both situations have been clearly defined and Democrats, knowing what it takes to win, have chosen to pursue a suboptimal coalition building strategy.
It gives me flashbacks to being a Timberwolves fan in the Flip Saunders 2.0 era. Amongst the many reasons they lost all the time was shooting by far the least amount of three pointers by choice. The team made a horrible strategic choice and paid for it over and over again. At least with them though, the fans were smart enough to realize that they were shooting themselves in the foot and not blame the league for biasing the game against them by introducing the three pointer decades earlier.
As Democrats, we have no one to blame but ourselves for how difficult we've chosen to make it for us to win.
“Bias” has a perfectly neutral and technical statistical meaning. The electoral college is “biased” in the sense that the median electoral vote is in a state whose party split is several points off of the national party split. Sometimes you want a biased estimator (for instance, your virus test should probably be biased towards false positives rather than false negatives).
"The rules are biased against people who live in cities"
But they're not - assuming you're talking about congress the rules haven't changed much in many decades and the bias is a very recent phenomenon that is heavily impacted by ever-changing population shifts. With the rate of continued urbanization if voting patterns hold constant the bias might actually disappear and reverse within a decade or two. To remove geographic bias you'd have to remove geographic representation.
And if you're talking about the electoral college, the bias is even more temporary and subject to whichever small number of states happen to be the swing states. It used to reliably be Ohio and Florida (not particularly rural) - now it's Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and the upper Midwest. I agree it's not ideal, but it's not "biased against cities".
“The goal should be everyone's vote counts equally”
Why should that be the goal? Why shouldn’t the goal be to maintain a federation of the states?
Because an unrepresentative government is more easily captured by rent seeking, narrow interests. The governments most likely to protect fair, competitive marketplaces are those which are responsible to all citizens equally. See Acemoglu and Robinson's Why Nations Fail for further details.
There was this little thing called the Civil War.
Yeah: The good guys won and ensured the federation of states remained.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_man,_one_vote
I too support repealing the 17th Amendment.
No of course I wouldn't be fine with that. In fact, I've advocated that the top priority that Dems should have had for their two years in power was to admit Puerto Rico and DC as states, even if PR is going to be more purplish than blue. Anything other than that kind of structural change is going to get washed away.
We are, however, clearly not doing that. And there aren't other real plans to change the rules about the Senate or the EC. Wishing we had another country's electoral system without any plan to move ours to that other system doesn't do anything. Without structural changes, our choices go back to change our coalition building strategy or likely lose.
More Conor Lambs. Fewer John Fettermans.
I was thinking the opposite might save the Dems from an electoral trouncing. That's not so much based on my own preference as it is on my read of the electorate. He seems like someone who can connect with a wide range of voters, including many swing voters and especially blue collar voters. The man has the most blue collar face I've ever seen.
I really want to find out (1) if you can wear shorts in the Senate and (2) who's going to tell him he can't.
I saw a pretty shocking map the other day that (aside from Texas), every single state gaining college graduates voted for Joe Biden. The West Coast, Minnesota, Colorado, Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey, Maine, Maryland, New York, Mass, Rhode Island and Virginia. So the Senate problem will just get worse and worse as more and more people with means and education leave the conservative states
Also, I don’t think it even matters who wins the Presidency via vote? Republicans we’re very clear with their votes last time that if they control Congress they’re going to install Trump as President whether or not he wins. Nothing about the stupid laws have been fixed, and Republicans have only gotten more unreasonable since then. If it’s all done legally, do we really think Biden and other Democrats have the courage to resist?
If Texas flipped to blue-leaning while all other states stayed their same colors, that would do a large part in reversing the Electoral College disadvantage.
Although not the Senate
How much of the college grads for Dem stuff is about not liking Republicans and how much is just about Trump? If Romney were the Republican nominee many college grads would go back to the Republican Party. Maybe many white working class peeps would go back to the Dems? I don’t know, but I’m skeptical this is the new normal. Just saying Trump drove a lot if this stuff.
I think Trump drove a lot of it, but since he's almost certainly going to be the Republican nominee in 2024 (absent death or some really severe health event), that means the Democrats need to survive one more round of it before things revert to status quo.
Probably true, I hope not though.
Hey would you share where you got that map? I'd be interested to learn more.
I'll just say that by far the most obvious thing D's could and should have done to bolster their coalition like a decade ago was drop gun control from their agenda. Yes it'll piss off people in states they already won by 30, but it would help them literally everywhere else. It's a high cultural, low practical salience issue. And it's been clear for a while that it's a lost cause in the courts anyways. Sticking behind assault weapon bans, and capacity limits and "ghost gun" hysteria is an all downside proposition that hurts them in exactly the places they need to stop bleeding votes.
Can we come up with a way to get votes that doesn't directly lead to more mass shootings? I'll take anything else to pander on please.
Ha https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1513638441770266630?s=20&t=isvBTV8pdlAlnexGr24t4Q
These things are generally popular (https://news.gallup.com/poll/1645/guns.aspx). But they're not *wildly* popular and, more to the point, it's impossible for them to pass. That's why I'm okay with the Democrats stating them as part of their principled positions; I just don't want them to lead any more doomed efforts to try to pass them. All that does is infuriate that solid minority bloc of the population that will die on the hill of unlimited gun rights while disappointing people who would like to see more gun control but, outside of the latest horrific slaughter, really doesn't think about it.
The last thing the Democrats should do is reverse their position on guns. No one would believe them, it would pick up no new votes, and would simply prove how they have no principles. Just don't jump up and down about how this time you're really going to do something about it.
Contrast that with "defunding the police." That's wildly unpopular (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/10/police-reform-polls-white-black-crime.html) and the entire Democratic party was getting branded with something that almost all of the leadership opposed. That's why it was brilliant politics of Biden to use the State of the Union to reject that piece of non-popularist idiocy.
Ehhh, even where you can get small majority preference, it's an issue where the level of voter investment is wildly biased towards the 2A camp. And you can't escape the geography problem, the voters you lose being anti gun are votes you really need and the votes you lose by respecting gun rights are votes you can afford to lose.
I would also add that this is an area where most left-of-center people, myself included, don't have any lived experience because we don't own guns. One of my closest friends is a conservative Republican, now in the military, for whom gun rights are a top voting issue, and a point he always made to me was that he felt frustrated by liberals who objectively knew less about guns that he did telling him that his views were wrong.
"Know less but lecture me" is an extremely common frustration. I constantly have to point out that machine guns are already basically illegal, most gun deaths in the US are suicides, the "gun show loophole" isn't about gun shows, so on. More than any other issue I can think of, there is a massive information asymmetry on gun control: the median democrat knows almost nothing about gun laws except that they want more.
I'm a fairly centrist technocrat type who wants to keep firearms legal, and I would be much more open to voting Dem if they would drop the attempts to restrict firearms. I feel like having me voting for a carbon tax and legal abortion in a purplish state is more valuable than running up the vote count in Massachusetts.
What I find frustrating about the Gun Rights debate is Gun Rights activists want the debate to be about the details, while Gun Rights opponents argue on moral and emotional grounds. Everyone agrees on the emotion (well, almost everyone) but then the debate shifts to "the details" and it becomes a stupid muddled mess.
Personally I find the Gun Rights arguments to be specious. The US has far more gun deaths than the rest of the industrialized world, and the reason is obvious: we're ALSO an outlier in gun rights. So the answer to me is obvious, but I see no path forward currently.
Specifically, with regard to the steps Biden/ATF announced yesterday, steps that overwhelmingly target firearm enthusiast/hobbyists being taken as a reflexive "anti-crime" effort is embarrassingly disconnected from anything that will actually impact levels of violence and extremely insulting to the sorts of people with personal experience assembling home built guns.
I agree here as well - I think any real reform we're going to get in this country at a national level, it's going to come from gun owners / pro-gun politicians leading the way. It was a conservative Australia PM led the charge on pretty radical gun reform after they saw a horrific school shooting.
I think Manchin and Toomey showed real leadership here - they tried in 2013 after the Newtown tragedy - they were bipartisan "A rated" NRA members with rural constituents who said it was time for common sense reform. I thought it was worth the attempt then, they got 54 votes. But until we think we can get that close and have bipartisan support for a bill, I don't think it's worth drawing attention to doomed efforts that will hurt electorally.
I am sympathetic to this in some ways, but less in others. Sure liberals may not know what ‘actually’ constitutes an assault rifle, but the more important knowledge is knowing handguns are far more likely than long rifles to be used in crimes.
Most gun deaths are suicides, yet it’s not a big political issue. The gun rights debate has fell off so far from reality it’s barely worth engaging in anymore. But I don’t think giving up on gun rights will help Democrats much.
handguns are far more likely than long rifles (or assault rifles) to be used in crimes (or suicide) but no one is actually arguing to get rid of handguns because of their use as a home defense tool. Maybe handgun abolishment is the secret goal--many gun supporters are suspicious--but no one is advocating for that. So, people on the right see a lot of virtue signaling in left proposals that won't have any public safety impact but will impact their ability to enjoy shooting guns they enjoy having.
The Democratic Party’s issues stem far beyond just gun control at this point.
But is it really part of the Democrats' agenda?
Here's what the DNC has to say about gun control:
"Democrats believe that we can reduce gun violence while respecting the rights of responsible gun owners. We believe we should expand and strengthen background checks for those who want to purchase a firearm – because it shouldn’t be easier to get a gun than a driver’s license. We believe we should ensure that guns don’t fall into the hands of terrorists (whether they be domestic or foreign), domestic abusers, other violent criminals, or those who have shown signs of danger toward themselves or others. And we believe we should treat gun violence as the deadly public health crisis it is." (https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/the-issues/preventing-gun-violence/)
The Biden position was more detailed but arguably no more aggressive: https://joebiden.com/gunsafety/
If the Democratic party and its nominee had entirely dropped all that verbiage from its materials and just said nothing, how many more votes would they have gotten. Very very few, I'd say.
https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1513638441770266630?s=20&t=isvBTV8pdlAlnexGr24t4Q
The Biden DoJ/ATF are literally announcing plans trying to redefine a firearm receiver today. They're also moving to redefine tens of thousands of braced "pistols" as short barreled rifles in a move that would make thousands of people felons because ATF thinks it has the power to arbitrarily redefine the law. None of these moves will impact gun violence. It's simply culture war bullshit criminalizing gun owners.
They dropped the proposed pistol brace/SBR rule man. They proposed it, then they dropped it when they encountered pushback.
As a very pro-gun guy who owns multiple ARs (hell I own an AR pistol with a brace that would've been affected by Biden's withdrawn rule), I don't even understand what the argument would be against requiring a stamped serial number on a lower. Like, are there are any gun restrictions you're OK with? We'll allow fully automatic weapons to be sold freely again? Explosives? How about barring firearm sales to felons, you OK with that one?
The pistol brace rule is dead? Hope it stays that way.
The whole "ghost gun" thing is a wildly dumb red herring. Just doesn't matter. Just trying to make shit sound scary to no useful end. Presumably the goal of the new rulemaking is to roadblock the availability of 80 percent lowers and various parts, again with the only meaningful outcome being an assault on gun owners wallets.
The actual rule just released is far too long for me to possibly parse all the implications at this moment. The most objectionable bit is ATF's penchant for claiming to have the power to simply redefine people into being felons.
I do happen to think there's probably room for a coherent, comprehensive federal gun control compromise that respects the 2A, but everyone would hate it and the politicians would rather have the issue than a resolution.
The Democrats' agenda, in this sense, is the most radical thing that any vaguely serious person in the party said and didn't receive massive pushback for. Beto O'Rourke (pretty much the definition of "vaguely serious") said "Hell yes, we are going to take your AR-15". and he didn't get the shocked demands he take it back that, say, Ilhan Omar got when she used anti-semitic tropes against Israel.
If someone says something and they don't get dogpiled for it, then the party gets tagged with it. That's why the Republican lack of pushback against MTG is so damning - if the Kevin McCarthys and Mitch McConnells of this world were aggressively pushing back the way they did to Madison Cawthorn about the sex and drugs stuff, then it would be treated as a fringe position. But they don't, they just ignore it, and that is (not unreasonably) seen as meaning that even moderate members of the party are either OK with it or secretly support it - apart from individuals who do their own pushback, like Romney and Collins.
Beto O'Rourke dropped out of the presidential campaign on Nov. 1, 2019. He was a total non-entity in the Democratic race. It's not the job of leaders of the Democratic party to comment on every stupid comment made by second or third tier candidates.
I'd like to see evidence how their silence on MTG is hurting Republicans (among whom?) but while she's not a leader of the party, she's a hell of a fund raiser.
I'm not saying that the *image* of the Democrats -- and the intense policy positions of many of them -- are strongly pro-gun control, just that if you look at what the party as a whole and the leadership says, it's not crazy stuff and that dropping that would not likely help them.
I'm saying that if you have an image of being strongly pro-gun control, then you have to say things that counter that. And if you want to do that without sounding like an obviously fake pro-gun person, then your best opportunity is to jump on a prominent national Democrat who has taken a position much more hostile to guns than the Democratic consensus - because you can do that without sounding like an NRA stooge.
I agree Democrats have a lot less room for error. Trump, at an event centering on gun control while he was POTUS, said he favored confiscating guns from suspected bad actors before any due process. Imagine if Obama had thrown that out there. There was no real blowback for Trump saying that, or other anti-gun things (bump stock regulation - restricting gun rights passed in 2018!) from the pro-gun voters - because they know the GOP is firmly in line with the NRA.
Sure I can see that. Just regarding O'Rourke though, that would not have worked back in the fall of 2019 when no one other than Democrats (and trolling Republicans) were paying attention to the primary debate.
I agree. I'm passionate about gun control but can see it's clearly doing a lot of harm politically and not achieving what it hopes to on the national level. There's a lot you can accomplish more quietly at a state level.
Obama was fairly close to this from 2008-2012; he actually *expanded* gun rights in office (permitting guns on Amtrak) in that first term. The NRA and gun lobby will still convince millions of people that Democrats are just waiting to snatch guns away even if they drop gun control from the agenda, but maybe some voters will be persuadable.
The issue with moderate Democrats is they a. say sincerely that they don't want to take away peoples guns, then a fellow Dem comes out and says... yes that is the goal. Or b.. they actually say they want to take away guns (Beto).
Gun control is one issue that I rarely see anyone address.
The most public gun control platform issues are the ones that are the least efficient. Universal Background Checks (gun show loophole)... this wouldn't make a dent in the gun murders in the U.S. (I support it anyway... just realistic about its impact)
The things that would work... harsher penalties/longer sentences for people who commit crimes with guns would result in a huge disparate impact issue.
A huge percentage of murders are committed by people who have previous gun possession convictions.
Now most gun owners... vast majority are law abiding, but also aware of these statistics. There is a cultural punishment angle to the public gun control discussion.
Disclaimer: I own multiple weapons. All kept in a safe.
I haven't looked into it much but I like the idea of requiring liability insurance for people seeking license to carry - I think IL is pursuing this right now.
Discounts for people with gun safes, safety training courses completed, military/police, record of safety. But if you're Dick Cheney and you shot a guy in the face on accident...you're either uninsurable or should have sky high premiums.
People with carry licenses don't commit crime. They're like the statistically most law abiding demographic in the country. This sort of suggestion is exactly the worst thing D's do. Proposals that entirely burden the most law abiding set of gun owners while doing absolutely nothing to constrain violence or crime are wildly alienating and blare out the ignorance of people who have no personal experience navigating the existing gun law environment in the country.
"People with carry licenses don't commit crime." - pretty bold statement to say members of any group 'don't commit crime', also pretty easy to debunk - https://concealedcarrykillers.org/
It's also incredibly easy to recognize when a statement is statistical and obviously not an absolute.
But it would do zero to help with gun violence.
That's a bold claim - any evidence you can share that it would have zero impact?
As discussed here, we know 'gun violence' is a lot more than just the high profile mass shooting. A large part is suicides. A small but still tragically high number are kids playing with unsecured weapons. If gun liability nudged people to have safer gun habits, you're certain it would have zero lives saved?
We also just have a lot of knuckleheads do stupid things with guns that might not kill anyone, but I would still like to see them paying high premiums, the same way terrible drivers should pay higher premiums on their car insurance. Consider the FBI agent who shot someone by accident because he did a flip on a dance floor at a wedding. That was really dumb and could have killed someone. I don't think he needs to face the most extreme punishment, but a gun liability law could make sure his record with a grossly negligent incident is reflected in his gun liability rates should he still want to carry a gun in his personal life.
I mean is there any reason to believe that the subset of negligent/accidental firearm injuries is on a scale anything remotely like cars? Let alone the danger posed to persons other than oneself? How many people actually pull a Dick Cheney? I'm gonna guess there's a laundry list of things like pools, bicycles, trampolines, scooters etc. Etc. That pose a similar risk.
I would agree with this for a carry permit. Not for just owning a gun though. Or transporting one.
It is absolutely true that effective gun control can lower gun crime, but it does so not by keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, but by keeping guns out of everyone (so the criminals can't steal them or pretend to be non-criminals), and the scale of the regulation that would be needed to have any effective impact in the US is way beyond the politically possible - and the inevitable failure of any policy that is politically possible will just discredit gun control.
I'd love to see Democratic politicians going to gun-control lobby groups and saying "regulations could stop children being murdered in schools, but voters won't vote for them. Go and convince white Christians in rural areas to demand gun control and I'll pass the policies you like: but stop campaigning in Democratic primaries, because all you are doing is picking people who lose to Republicans".
An actual effective gun control scheme would basically be a blanket ban of every firearm designed in the last 125 years. Like, the lethality gap in firing into a crowd with an 1897 shotgun vs a 2021 AR-15 is really not very significant.
Well, yes, but that's clearly the goal of some people from the occasional gaspingly hysterical mention in news report about guns that let you fire a bullet each time you pull the trigger, i.e., a semi-automatic weapon of the sort that's existed since the late 19th Century (and have made up a majority of new handgun sales for a few decades now, I believe).
UK law bans all handguns (defined as shorter than 24") and all semi-automatic and automatic weapons.
The most powerful gun that is licensable and anything resembling common is an SMLE (Short, Magazine Lee-Enfield), ie the rifle used by the British Army in the two World Wars.
Yes, I'm aware that the UK has much more restrictive gun control laws than the US (as do many other countries), but I don't see the connection to my comment?
I think some US gun control people would like to end up with gun laws like the UK, and the UK exists as an exemplar of what is possible.
Banning something doesn't make it magically go away. See also the drug war.
Works better with guns than drugs for various reasons, but you need a really comprehensive ban to be effective.
Except for the whole amending the Constitution part.
And such laws exist and work in other countries.
UK firearms law says that the only firearms that normal people can have are muzzle-loaders (no licence required) and shotguns (SGC, much simpler licence) that have to be broken open to reload and may have no more than three barrels.
Rifles that are not self-loading (ie semi-automatic) can be licensed (also semi-autos in .22LR), but getting a licence is pretty arduous - and you have to license each gun separately, so large collections are always illegal. There are just over 100,000 such licenses (guns, not persons) in the UK - about 1 per 600 persons.
Pistols (guns shorter than 24" or with a barrel under 12") are wholly illegal for private use and cannot be licensed; some manufacturers make very long pistols specifically so competition shooters can use them. There are some exceptions for elite-level sporting events (e.g. the 2012 Olympics had one)
Ammunition cannot be legally sold without a firearms licence, other than black powder.
The net effect is that criminals mostly can't get guns. Armed robberies frequently involve replica firearms because the criminals can't get real ones. Even when they can, they are often deeply unreliable, especially the massive jam tendencies in badly made/badly repaired semi-automatics.
Sure, but this is wildly beyond the scope of the Overton window of "common sense gun control" bullshit the D's waste their political capital getting behind.
Absolutely, which was my argument: either you do something actually effective, or you do something politically effective (ie shut up about guns).
That's why I suggested supporting the NRA definition of what the second amendment means and also supporting repeal: "I want to restrict guns; it's unconstitutional to do it, that's why I want to repeal the second amendment. Until it is repealed, gun restrictions are unconstitutional and I will vote against breaking the constitution".
Aside: unlike drugs, gun manufacturing and concealment is hard enough that if no-one is allowed to make or carry a gun, then it can be effectively enforced to the point that even criminals can't get guns.
Now, the US would have the problem that it has lots of guns already and you'd have to remove them all, but if you had the political consensus necessary to pass such laws, then the vast majority of gun owners would voluntarily give up their guns. The fact that that last sentence is laughable is why a political campaign to get rid of guns won't get off the ground.
A Democrat could perhaps get around it by a "no half measures on guns, repeal the second amendment or nothing" position - knowing that gun owners will recognise that second amendment repeal is going nowhere and therefore the substance of this person's position is "nothing" - especially if they then vote against gun control measures.
2nd Amendment advocates would take you seriously...if not literally. They are scared of the smallest 2nd amendment rollback. They aren't going to take "a full repeal or nothing" argument like "oh, he means nothing." A republican would just respond "nothing". Then who would they side with? the guy threatening repeal or nothing...or the guy saying nothing?
Your statement about gun manufacturing was maybe true until 3d printed guns got reliable enough to use in crime, which at this point is 3-5 years ago.
I'm talking about the difficulty of getting a gun in a country with an effective national gun ban, like the UK. Not about getting a gun as a criminal in a country where large numbers of non-criminals have guns.
It's certainly true that a 3D printed gun is an option, though pure 3D-printed receivers are still pretty poor unless you use 3D printers that can print in metal, which are still much too expensive for criminal use. If RocketLab can print a rocket engine in metal on a 3D printer, then I'm sure the same printer can print a receiver - but those are multi-million dollar machines, not really in the price range for a criminal. Now, CNC milling is a completely different story, but it's a question of how many CNC millers are prepared to associate themselves with violent criminal gangs - regardless of how much money they are offered. Still, I'll concede that this is getting much closer to being possible.
But where are you getting the ammunition?
I have fired a legally-owned SMLE here in the UK (it belonged to an acquaintance and was on a licensed range). Without a firearms certificate, I can't legally buy ammunition. Legally-owned ammunition is well-secured, and stealing it would result in a major police alert to track it down and retrieve it.
I can probably get hold of used brass. I could pour lead for the bullets, though making FMJ would be harder (not impossible, though). But nitrocellulose is a really hard problem. Powder is controlled the same as ammunition, so I'd probably have to make it myself. Nitric acid at the levels of concentration needed is a controlled substance, though you could probably steal some from a chemical plant - and cellulose is trivial; cotton is never going to be a controlled substance.
But making powder is notoriously dangerous, this isn't like a meth lab. Get it wrong, and you blow yourself up, and the people who know enough of how to do it to ever produce anything useful know how dangerous it is. You need permanent facilities, which are hard to hide, you need to be able to survive the occasional accidental explosion, which is going to attract attention. And I know I wouldn't trust the quality control enough to put it in a gun I was firing.
Hand casting bullets is absolutely a thing, and nowhere near as dangerous or difficult as you imagine here. There's an entire hobby industry here in the US devoted to enthusiasts hand casting their own bullets. I bet you the number of rounds hand-casted here in the US yesterday was in the four figures- just guys working in their garage or basement. I recommend poking around Youtube for some American redneck hand-casting how-tos
I didn't suggest that hand-casting bullets was difficult at all: "I could pour lead for the bullets, though making FMJ would be harder".
It's guncotton - nitrocellulose - that is a pain to make. You need strong nitric acid, you need to keep it cool, it takes a long time, and the safe way to do it is in very small batches, 24 hours or more for a batch that might be enough to fill a single AR-15 magazine's worth of rounds.
And primers are even worse. The chemistry is nastier, and primary explosives are shock-sensitive.
Hand casters tend to buy powder, not make it - and you'd have to be cracked to make your own primers. Primer factories - modern ones with all sorts of safety options that no-one has access to at home - still blow up occasionally. If criminal gangs had chemists making primers in secret labs the way that they have meth labs and crack labs, then we'd know about it, because of all the random explosions.
It's not 3D printing- this is a common misconception- it's CNC machining (which actually makes it worse, because there's probably 10 million CNC machines across the US, in every machine shop)
3D printing is a very viable means of acquiring a firearm. US laws only consider the serialized part to be a "firearm" and allow all other parts to be bought without a background check. For weapons where the receiver just holds the rest of the parts together and doesn't handle much stress it's pretty easy to print the receiver. Once you have a printed receiver you can buy OEM parts to finish it off and have them delivered to your door. There are a few guys doing AR-15 lowers and AWCY has released a 3d printed receiver for the CZ Scorpion Pistol Caliber Carbine.
Either process works. Fully 3d printed semiautomatic carbines with electrochemically rifled barrels are entirely attainable for the average handyman/hobbyist (notably the FGC-9). If you allow purchasing of unregulated metal parts, AR/AK pattern rifles and many pistol/PDW designs are also doable.
CNC will get you anything else, but the low bar is 3D printing, which is much more affordable and low skill than CNC.
Most of what you've written here is incorrect. There is no 3D printing process for a metal receiver yet. There are easily 10-20 million guys in America who can operate a CNC machine, and the new Ghost Gunner CNC machines require zero skill, just a laptop. There are no 3D printed firearms yet except for extremely goofy, plastic, single-shot ones. I think you have the basic facts right but you've confused CNC with 3D
All "possession" crimes are trash and ripe for abuse. Throwing thousands of people in jail for being found to have a gun is a terrible fucking alternative to solving actual crimes.
"Guns aren't like drugs... they cost hundreds of dollars and are much harder to get."
you sound like someone not very familiar with drugs or guns. It's quite easy to spend hundreds (or thousands) on drugs.
Also, while it's true that the black market for guns is smaller than the drug market, at least part of that is because it's so easy to get legal guns.
More prohibition, will just mean more people getting guns off the black market
Excellent question. Maybe the premises of those laws are dumb, also usually racist. Wouldn't that be something to find out? You should look into it.
I'm not sure public defenders taking the libertarian position on a criminal justice issue is a good horseshoe anecdote.
TIL this term. Thanks!
This is a good point. Turn gun control into a local issue... why use it to hamper national races.
There are a good many issues where this is probably good advice.
You can't wish issues to the state and local level. Republicans will bring it up as a wedge issue. You can try...but easier said than done.
It’s impossible to have a local issue these days. Nearly all political engagement is national (or even global).
And just to expand on that (or make express what you implied), even if not a single Democrat running for or elected to a federal office mentioned gun control for two years, the issue can and would still hurt Dems among rural voters. People hear "New York Democrats move to add additional restrictions on gun ownership" and they do not readily conclude that this is limited to only one state's Democratic party, and only in that state's legislature. It is hard to shed a national brand that is the result of thousand of politicians' choices and concerted RW media effort to make sure negative aspects of the brand relationship stick.
“…they do not readily conclude that this is limited to only one state's Democratic party, and only in that state's legislature”
Because it’s not only in one state, it’s in basically every single state under the control of the Democratic Party. If I drive from Florida to Maine I can legally carry a loaded pistol with me - on my person or accessible from the driver’s seat in FL, GA, SC, NA, and VA. But in order to comply with the law, before entering DC I would have to unload the pistol, lock it in a box, lock the ammunition in a separate box, and store those boxes in the trunk of the car or in a place not readily accessible from the passenger are of an SUV. Those same requirements have to be followed in MD, DE, PA, NJ, NY, CT, and MA.
(Once I get across the NH border, however, it’s lock & load time, because, Live Free or Die!)
I was making a point about how peoples' perception of a political party's platform is leaky across state borders even when not warranted. I agree that, as to this issue, the reality is that the party is consistently and correctly identified as pro gun control across many, if not all, states.
There was a time where it really seemed like it might get devolved out of the platform. Seemed like people realized it was a losing issue. Then Obama made his infamous "cling to their bibles and guns" comment and it's been a stone on the party's neck ever since. Maybe the tactically dumbest thing he ever said.
@Simon Bazelon is Emily your mom?
Yes: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/podcast-lonely-lebron-dominant-serena-and-nate-vs-a-12-year-old/