For a candidate known for caution, Hillary Clinton is doing something awfully bold right now: advocating for stronger gun laws, pushing to the forefront of the campaign agenda an issue that in recent years Democrats have been afraid to make too much noise about. And she's doing it by attacking the National Rifle Association, which I've been arguing for years is a paper tiger when it comes to elections-but a paper tiger everyone fears.
On Friday, Clinton got asked a question about the large gun buyback program Australia instituted after the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, in which 35 people were murdered. In the wake of that event, the country not only bought back hundreds of thousands of guns, it also passed a series of tough gun control measures; Australia hasn't seen a mass shooting since. Clinton spoke about the Australian experience in a way that indicated she knew the basics of what occurred there, even if she was a bit fuzzy on the details, and said that a national gun buyback "would be worth considering."
Naturally, the NRA responded with Hillary Clinton is coming to confiscate your guns!!!, just like they said that Barack Obama was coming to confiscate your guns, and Bill Clinton was coming to confiscate your guns (if you're a gun owner, you may have noticed that the jackbooted government thugs have not yet kicked down your door). And for the record, there isn't much evidence that the local gun buybacks that have occurred here in the U.S. have had much effect on levels of violence. But the remarkable thing is that Clinton feels comfortable talking about gun control and criticizing the NRA by name.
Does that mean that something has really changed in our political environment? Call me cynical, but I have trouble imagining that Clinton would make this kind of public appeal on guns without first having her team of pollsters test it thoroughly. We've known for a long time that specific gun measures are widely popular, particularly universal background checks, which get around 90 percent support in polls. But the assumption has always been that gun advocates are far more motivated than opponents of gun proliferation, and so they exercise an outsize influence and therefore need to be feared.
But don't forget that Hillary Clinton isn't running for a seat in a marginal congressional district where she might worry that the NRA could get lots of people to vote against her. She's running for president, in an election when turnout will be high and the constituencies less likely to support gun proliferation-young people, people who live in cities, minorities-will be coming out to vote in higher numbers than they would in an off-year election. And of course, she still has to win her party's nomination, and this is one of the few issues on which she can get to Bernie Sanders' left.
By going after the NRA, Clinton is following what President Obama did after the recent mass shooting in Oregon, when he said, "I would particularly ask America's gun owners-who are using those guns properly, safely, to hunt, for sport, for protecting their families-to think about whether your views are properly being represented by the organization that suggests it's speaking for you." This is essentially Clinton's line too: that America has plenty of responsible, reasonable gun owners, but they shouldn't consider the NRA their representative because the group is so radical.
If there's going to be any chance that gun legislation might actually pass through Congress, it will only happen if this wedge is driven between the NRA and American gun owners. As of now, the NRA has successfully made opposition to any law to limit or even inconvenience gun ownership a core Republican value, as universal among the party's elected officials as opposition to tax increases or abortion rights. That opposition holds even on issues where nine out of ten American disagree with the party's view.
So could Clinton overcome that opposition? It's possible, but not very likely. The components of her plan on guns are perfectly worthwhile, but if she's going to see them passed, a lot about the Congress is going to have to change.
And now let's consider the sobering reality. If we do pass national gun legislation, it will start with those things everyone agrees on, like universal background checks. They're an excellent idea, but they won't change the fundamental reality that there are more than 300 million guns in America. With some well-crafted legislation we might start to bring down the death toll, which now stands at over 30,000 Americans killed by guns every year. But even if we can make some progress, there will still be hundreds of millions of guns in circulation, and tens of thousands of Americans will keep dying.
One way to think about gun legislation is to compare it with the Affordable Care Act. Before the ACA, we had what was undoubtedly the worst health care system in the industrialized world: we spent far more than any of our peer countries, yet we left tens of millions of our citizens with no health coverage at all, and those who had coverage could lose it at any time or find themselves in danger of death or destitution in the case of an injury or accident. The ACA did tremendous good, eliminating the fear that comes with not being able to get coverage, and bringing insurance to millions who didn't have it before.
But guess what: we still have the worst health care system in the industrialized world, albeit one whose extraordinary cruelty has been reduced and whose runaway costs have been slowed (though not reversed). The ACA was a reform, not a revolution, and it left the private, intricate system that produced all those pathologies largely intact.
So it would be with the kind of modest gun control we might actually hope for. Would it be better if a background check accompanied every gun sale, or permitting requirements were made more stringent? Absolutely. Lives would be saved. But the fundamental fact that America is drowning in guns would be unchanged. Even if we could reduce the carnage, we'd still have more gun deaths than any other industrialized country.
Hillary Clinton deserves credit for taking on this issue, even if the prospects for real change are limited at best. That change, if it comes, will take years or even decades. But you have to start somewhere.
