Democrats Are Newly Emboldened on Gun Control
Exit polls in November showed that 59 percent of voters in House races favored “stricter gun-control measures.”
In July 2001, at a meeting in Indianapolis, national Democratic chairman Terry McAuliffe told party brethren that gun control was an issue they were wise to avoid. Nobody in the ballroom challenged him. The consensus at the time was that Democrats had lost the House seven years earlier, when Newt Gingrich’s GOP picked up 54 seats, because President Bill Clinton had signed a ban on the sale of assault weapons. And in 2001, many Democrats believed that Al Gore had lost the recent presidential race because southern white males had tagged him as a gun controller.
There was ample evidence that the assault-weapons ban was just one of many factors that fed the Democratic wipeout in 1994,
