Typical is the most recent Gallup Poll on the subject, conducted about a month before the 2020 election. The Gallup Poll has asked the same question for 20 years: “In general, do you feel that the laws covering the sales of firearms should be made more strict, less strict, or kept as they are now?” Gallup’s approach, which asks about attitudes rather than specific legislation, represents an ideal way to measure voter sentiment over time.Īside from some dips during Barack Obama’s presidency, support for the “more strict” option has been consistently been over 50 percent since 2000. Stricter gun legislation has consistently won majority support in national surveys. Thus, was born an Iron Law of American politics: Only those legislators with safe seats could ever dare cross the all-powerful National Rifle Association. Foley was the first Speaker to be defeated in more than a century.” “They beat both Speaker Tom Foley and Jack Brooks, two of the ablest members of Congress, who had warned me this would happen. “The NRA had a great night,” Clinton wrote with obvious pain in his autobiography, My Life. That upbeat mood lasted until the 1994 elections brought Newt Gingrich to power as House speaker. As the Los Angeles Ti mes wrote in a front-page news analysis, “Clinton can rightly say that … he succeeded in breaking a six-year jam in which gun control opponents on one side and death penalty opponents on the other had been able to block passage of any bill.” In the immediate aftermath of the 1994 crime bill vote, Democratic strategists expressed cautious optimism that they had finally neutralized the “law and order” issue that Republicans had been flogging since Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign. In fact, we are sadly back at square one since there were not enough votes in Congress to prevent the assault weapons ban from expiring in 2004. Twenty-six years and hundreds of thousands of shooting deaths later, gun safety advocates are still waiting for that second step toward rationality. The Washington Post in an editorial on the crime bill decried the facile comparisons between legislating and making sausage as “grossly unfair to sausage makers.” But the Post did hail the assault weapons ban as “the first step toward a more rational national policy on the control of guns.”
The overall legislation was badly flawed, and the bill only survived a procedural challenge in the Senate after six Republicans broke party ranks to support gun control. When Congress passed President Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill - with an assault weapons ban as a key provision - the victorious Democrats were in no mood to launch skyrockets. Attend the Brennan Legacy Awards Dinner.Advance Constitutional Change Show / hide.National Task Force on Democracy Reform & the Rule of Law.Government Targeting of Minority Communities Show / hide.Campaign Finance in the Courts Show / hide.Gerrymandering & Fair Representation Show / hide.
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