Why Don’t Mass Shootings Lead to Gun Control? - The Daily Beast

After the horrific Dark Knight massacre in Colorado, there are already calls for greater gun control. But if history is any guide, Adam Winkler says it’s unlikely that anything but sympathy will result.

What changed? Perhaps the most important cause of the shift was the growing political influence of the NRA—and the decreasing strength of the gun control movement. Although the National Rifle Association has been around since just after the Civil War, the organization became radicalized in the mid-1970s after a group of hardline gun control opponents took the helm. The new NRA made fighting to defeat gun control its signature issue. When Democrats lost their majority in the House of Representatives for the first time in 1994—which no less an expert than President Bill Clinton blamed on the passage of the Brady Bill—the party traditionally open-minded about gun control dropped the issue. 

On the other hand, what America needs is not a bunch of new gun laws that attempt to respond to yesterday’s shooting. America’s gun laws are already a patchwork of fifty-one different gun control regimes (each state plus the federal government). Because of the easy transport of guns across state lines, that patchwork is predictably ineffective at enhancing public safety. The only gun control laws that would really work would be federal laws that bind every state.


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Why Don’t Mass Shootings Lead to Gun Control? - The Daily Beast