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.
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".
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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".
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?
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
"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 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.
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.
As Democrats write off more and more states I find the arguments about senate/EC bias less compelling.
To an extent, at this point the entire debate hinges on the idiosyncratic unpopularity of republicans in California. If Republicans gain there (or Democrats fall) you’ll see the skew disappear.
Moreover, it’s one thing to argue that Democrats are the more popular party nationally but their votes are grouped inefficiently. As this ‘inefficiently’ starts to just mean “in California” they begin to resemble any regional party in a parliamentary system whose vote share outperforms their seat total.
The Bloc Québécois is not the victim of a bad system but of their own intentionally targeted appeal.
And it's telling that many Democrats see the "solutions" as either changing the rules of the game, or engineering a Democratic advantage by creating more states instead of competing in the system whose rules haven't changed in a very long time. It's not as if we woke up one day to discover the Democrats somehow had a structural disadvantage foisted upon them. The disadvantage is the result of emergent politics and political choices made by both Republicans and Democrats over time.
It seems to me the obvious solution to this problem is for the Democratic party to do what it has always done until recently - compete in the system as it is. It used to be that Democrats had the structural advantage. The fact that they have lost it is primarily a problem with Democrats, not a problem with the system.
And I find the idea that we ought to engineer the system to be more "fair" to one party to be deeply troubling. It's a kind of gerrymandering on steroids.
I think there's something wrong with the idea that the rules haven't changed in a very long time. The rules have changed a ton across various states and continue to do so. Gerrymandering is alot more precise than it used to be and doing well in 2010 was a huge advantage for Republicans in a way that's hard to unwind.
And you don't think Republicans once added states for political gain? Because they did, though the politics of the country was very different.
On top of that you have a Supreme Court that is locked in as a 6-3 Republican majority for the foreseeable future no matter how many elections Democrats win.
It's not about engineering the system to being more fair to one party. It's about ensuring that the party who gets the majority of the votes actually gets a chance to govern. Whereas right now the Democrats can win more votes than the Republicans and have that not be the case.
Democrats have no choice but to try and win on an unfair playing field and work within the system as is. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be more fair or that isn't a worthy eventual policy goal.
The system hasn't changed in the sense that the popular vote does not determine election outcomes for President. And the structure of the Senate also has not changed because this country is a federation of semi-sovereign states. If one wants to change those things, then I might support that, depending on the details, but I don't support "reforms" that are transparently intended to give an advantage to one party.
With regard to "fairness" this should not be seen in purely partisan terms. The system is most unfair to the majority of Americans who don't like either party and would prefer more options and accountability. Fairness would be an actual multi-party system which Democrats and Republicans both oppose.
A multi-party system would of course be more fair, and that's something that least some elements of the Democratic party do support. But it's also not a reform that's anywhere close to happening.
The structure of the Senate has changed significantly from founding. First of all Senators are no longer directly elected by state legislatures. But also we've add tons of states since the founding, and some instances it was done so for purely partisan gain.
The popular vote does not determine outcomes for President, but it is a very poor political system where one party can win by a significant margin and still lose the White House. Joe Biden won the popular vote by 7 million. Yet if you flip votes in three states by 22,000 or so, Donald Trump is still the president. And never before in American history have you had this large a disparity in the electoral college.
Also these reforms aren't designed to give an advantage to one party, they are designed to correct the the fact that rural areas have disproportionate influence in our political system, at the expense of everyone else. The goal is to have a level playing field, and the same way Democrats should make efforts to try and reach out to rural voters, Republicans should be similarly incentivized to try and win over the votes of urban voters.
We've had the same number of states for 63 years - that is a lot of election cycles and for most of that time the Democrats had a significant advantage. The current disadvantage for the Democrats is not due to structural problems or changes in the Senate, it's due to changes in partisan politics which Democrats are partly responsible for.
So I do not buy the argument that Democrats are somehow victims of our longstanding structural institutions and that the only valid or "fair" fix is to change those institutions to be more advantageous to Democrats. And it seems transparently true that most Democrats who are interested in adding more states at the present time take that position out of partisan interest.
My view is that we shouldn't make structural changes to our political institutions that are clearly intended for partisan advantage.
"The popular vote does not determine outcomes for President, but it is a very poor political system where one party can win by a significant margin and still lose the White House. "
I do think that mismatch is a problem. Of course, the reasons for why it is happening more often recently and what might be done about it tend to run in similar self-interested partisan veins.
In my view, the best way to fix that (and also fix or reduce many other problems) is to increase the size of the House. It's a reform that is defendable on the merits, does not give a definitive partisan advantage, is long overdue, and doesn't require a Constitutional amendment.
Of course, both Republicans and Democrats completely oppose it.
American history is longer than 63 years. You can't just pick a point in time and say it's not valid to add states after that.
It's also not the case that Democrats have had a significant advantage for most of that time. Indeed the last time a Republican Senate majority represented a majority of American people was after the 1994 election. The Democrats had a long standing advantage in the House (which is why in the early 90s it was George Bush pushing for ending gerrymandering), but that's not been the case for the Senate and it's gone back and forth quite a bit since Reagan became president.
The problem is you keep assuming if Democrat add states that those states are going to be permanent Democratic states. Where there's no reason that in the long term Republicans can't adjust and try to win both. The partisan leans of various states have changed a ton throughout American history.
And it's also sort of hypocritical because you want Democrats to do the same thing to try and compete in rural states. Why is it more fundamentally fair for one party to have to adjust because the rules are unfair as opposed to both parties being forced to try to appeal to the median voter. Again the idea is not to switch the system to benefit Democrats, but to make it fair for both parties. And under a fair system it's not as if Democrats wouldn't lose elections.
The point is to have a fair political system that doesn't advantage either party. As opposed to one where rural voters or any other kinds of voters have disproportionate influence on things. There wasn't a huge focus on fixing this before because it wasn't a problem before.
There isn't actually a ton of opposition to expanding the House. It's just not an issue anyone really cares much about. The other limiting factor is they just don't have the office space right now for that significant an increase.
Also the push for switching to the popular vote versus the electoral college is fairly long standing, and predates our current political situation.
> The disadvantage is the result of emergent politics and political choices made by both Republicans and Democrats over time.
Is it? Or is it a result of Republicans awarding themselves the Presidency in court in 2000 and then deliberately deciding to skew things via REDMAP in 2010?
The GOP bias in the electoral college actually comes not so much from the small states, but the big ones. The four biggest states with reliable Republican majorities are Texas, Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina - all close enough that very few votes are wasted, but none close enough to make the outcomes of statewide races seriously in doubt. Compare with the four biggest states with reliable Democratic majorities: California, New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts - much bigger margins and many more wasted votes.
(I'm skipping over the large tossup states of Michigan and Pennsylvania).
Being frank, the Republican Party *is* a regionalist party, of the South and the Sun Belt. It just so happens that the Sun Belt regions have nice weather and are the only ones that routinely permit large amounts of new housing construction, so they keep getting population inflow and seats whether or not anyone really likes the Republican Party's policies as such.
Urban/Suburban/Exurban/Rural explains Republican or Dem voters much better than state patterns. Rural and exurban parts of Illinois and New York vote R, urban parts of Tennessee and Nebraska vote D, for example. If you look at maps of vote margins the South and Sun Belt don't particularly stand out. Really only New England and west coast rural areas buck that trend.
Yep excellent point - I was trying to refer to their vote share locally but it was a bad analogy (and wouldn't have made sense in that context, which is why I used it incorrectly).
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.
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".
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.
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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".
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Democratic Party’s issues stem far beyond just gun control at this point.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1513638441770266630?s=20&t=isvBTV8pdlAlnexGr24t4Q
As Democrats write off more and more states I find the arguments about senate/EC bias less compelling.
To an extent, at this point the entire debate hinges on the idiosyncratic unpopularity of republicans in California. If Republicans gain there (or Democrats fall) you’ll see the skew disappear.
Moreover, it’s one thing to argue that Democrats are the more popular party nationally but their votes are grouped inefficiently. As this ‘inefficiently’ starts to just mean “in California” they begin to resemble any regional party in a parliamentary system whose vote share outperforms their seat total.
The Bloc Québécois is not the victim of a bad system but of their own intentionally targeted appeal.
I agree with that.
And it's telling that many Democrats see the "solutions" as either changing the rules of the game, or engineering a Democratic advantage by creating more states instead of competing in the system whose rules haven't changed in a very long time. It's not as if we woke up one day to discover the Democrats somehow had a structural disadvantage foisted upon them. The disadvantage is the result of emergent politics and political choices made by both Republicans and Democrats over time.
It seems to me the obvious solution to this problem is for the Democratic party to do what it has always done until recently - compete in the system as it is. It used to be that Democrats had the structural advantage. The fact that they have lost it is primarily a problem with Democrats, not a problem with the system.
And I find the idea that we ought to engineer the system to be more "fair" to one party to be deeply troubling. It's a kind of gerrymandering on steroids.
I think there's something wrong with the idea that the rules haven't changed in a very long time. The rules have changed a ton across various states and continue to do so. Gerrymandering is alot more precise than it used to be and doing well in 2010 was a huge advantage for Republicans in a way that's hard to unwind.
And you don't think Republicans once added states for political gain? Because they did, though the politics of the country was very different.
On top of that you have a Supreme Court that is locked in as a 6-3 Republican majority for the foreseeable future no matter how many elections Democrats win.
It's not about engineering the system to being more fair to one party. It's about ensuring that the party who gets the majority of the votes actually gets a chance to govern. Whereas right now the Democrats can win more votes than the Republicans and have that not be the case.
Democrats have no choice but to try and win on an unfair playing field and work within the system as is. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be more fair or that isn't a worthy eventual policy goal.
The system hasn't changed in the sense that the popular vote does not determine election outcomes for President. And the structure of the Senate also has not changed because this country is a federation of semi-sovereign states. If one wants to change those things, then I might support that, depending on the details, but I don't support "reforms" that are transparently intended to give an advantage to one party.
With regard to "fairness" this should not be seen in purely partisan terms. The system is most unfair to the majority of Americans who don't like either party and would prefer more options and accountability. Fairness would be an actual multi-party system which Democrats and Republicans both oppose.
A multi-party system would of course be more fair, and that's something that least some elements of the Democratic party do support. But it's also not a reform that's anywhere close to happening.
The structure of the Senate has changed significantly from founding. First of all Senators are no longer directly elected by state legislatures. But also we've add tons of states since the founding, and some instances it was done so for purely partisan gain.
The popular vote does not determine outcomes for President, but it is a very poor political system where one party can win by a significant margin and still lose the White House. Joe Biden won the popular vote by 7 million. Yet if you flip votes in three states by 22,000 or so, Donald Trump is still the president. And never before in American history have you had this large a disparity in the electoral college.
Also these reforms aren't designed to give an advantage to one party, they are designed to correct the the fact that rural areas have disproportionate influence in our political system, at the expense of everyone else. The goal is to have a level playing field, and the same way Democrats should make efforts to try and reach out to rural voters, Republicans should be similarly incentivized to try and win over the votes of urban voters.
We've had the same number of states for 63 years - that is a lot of election cycles and for most of that time the Democrats had a significant advantage. The current disadvantage for the Democrats is not due to structural problems or changes in the Senate, it's due to changes in partisan politics which Democrats are partly responsible for.
So I do not buy the argument that Democrats are somehow victims of our longstanding structural institutions and that the only valid or "fair" fix is to change those institutions to be more advantageous to Democrats. And it seems transparently true that most Democrats who are interested in adding more states at the present time take that position out of partisan interest.
My view is that we shouldn't make structural changes to our political institutions that are clearly intended for partisan advantage.
"The popular vote does not determine outcomes for President, but it is a very poor political system where one party can win by a significant margin and still lose the White House. "
I do think that mismatch is a problem. Of course, the reasons for why it is happening more often recently and what might be done about it tend to run in similar self-interested partisan veins.
In my view, the best way to fix that (and also fix or reduce many other problems) is to increase the size of the House. It's a reform that is defendable on the merits, does not give a definitive partisan advantage, is long overdue, and doesn't require a Constitutional amendment.
Of course, both Republicans and Democrats completely oppose it.
American history is longer than 63 years. You can't just pick a point in time and say it's not valid to add states after that.
It's also not the case that Democrats have had a significant advantage for most of that time. Indeed the last time a Republican Senate majority represented a majority of American people was after the 1994 election. The Democrats had a long standing advantage in the House (which is why in the early 90s it was George Bush pushing for ending gerrymandering), but that's not been the case for the Senate and it's gone back and forth quite a bit since Reagan became president.
The problem is you keep assuming if Democrat add states that those states are going to be permanent Democratic states. Where there's no reason that in the long term Republicans can't adjust and try to win both. The partisan leans of various states have changed a ton throughout American history.
And it's also sort of hypocritical because you want Democrats to do the same thing to try and compete in rural states. Why is it more fundamentally fair for one party to have to adjust because the rules are unfair as opposed to both parties being forced to try to appeal to the median voter. Again the idea is not to switch the system to benefit Democrats, but to make it fair for both parties. And under a fair system it's not as if Democrats wouldn't lose elections.
The point is to have a fair political system that doesn't advantage either party. As opposed to one where rural voters or any other kinds of voters have disproportionate influence on things. There wasn't a huge focus on fixing this before because it wasn't a problem before.
There isn't actually a ton of opposition to expanding the House. It's just not an issue anyone really cares much about. The other limiting factor is they just don't have the office space right now for that significant an increase.
Also the push for switching to the popular vote versus the electoral college is fairly long standing, and predates our current political situation.
> The disadvantage is the result of emergent politics and political choices made by both Republicans and Democrats over time.
Is it? Or is it a result of Republicans awarding themselves the Presidency in court in 2000 and then deliberately deciding to skew things via REDMAP in 2010?
State boundaries haven't changed (for the Senate), and the 2010 maps will be gone starting this election.
The GOP bias in the electoral college actually comes not so much from the small states, but the big ones. The four biggest states with reliable Republican majorities are Texas, Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina - all close enough that very few votes are wasted, but none close enough to make the outcomes of statewide races seriously in doubt. Compare with the four biggest states with reliable Democratic majorities: California, New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts - much bigger margins and many more wasted votes.
(I'm skipping over the large tossup states of Michigan and Pennsylvania).
Yep, the Electoral College would actually be a benefit to Democrats if they could win in large, multiracial democracies like Florida and Texas.
It was a benefit to democrats in 2008 and 2012, before the Midwest got redder than Virginia and Colorado.
Being frank, the Republican Party *is* a regionalist party, of the South and the Sun Belt. It just so happens that the Sun Belt regions have nice weather and are the only ones that routinely permit large amounts of new housing construction, so they keep getting population inflow and seats whether or not anyone really likes the Republican Party's policies as such.
Urban/Suburban/Exurban/Rural explains Republican or Dem voters much better than state patterns. Rural and exurban parts of Illinois and New York vote R, urban parts of Tennessee and Nebraska vote D, for example. If you look at maps of vote margins the South and Sun Belt don't particularly stand out. Really only New England and west coast rural areas buck that trend.
https://www.npr.org/2020/11/18/935730100/how-biden-won-ramping-up-the-base-and-expanding-margins-in-the-suburbs
The Republican Party has been doing very well in the Midwest and Great Plains as well...
Yep excellent point - I was trying to refer to their vote share locally but it was a bad analogy (and wouldn't have made sense in that context, which is why I used it incorrectly).
Even if all Democrats lived in California, that doesn't mean they should be politically disenfranchised.