The One Group That Could Make a Difference on Gun Control
Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates was begging for help.
“The police of America are pleading with you,” he told senators in 1989, urging them to adopt a ban on assault weapons. “I do not want any more officers to be spray-gunned to death by street punks armed with high-tech killing machines.”
Gates’s testimony preceded what might be considered the high-water mark of gun-control politics in America. His testimony, which followed the killing of five children in California after a gunman with an AK-47 opened fire on a school playground, is emblematic of the bipartisan tough-on-crime politics of the 1990s. After Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis’s landslide loss to George H. W. Bush in the 1988 election, the Democrats ran Bill Clinton in 1992, whose agenda earned him the endorsement of the Fraternal Order of Police. Clinton included the ban on assault weapons that Gates had begged for in the large crime bill he signed as president, and also signed the Brady Act, which imposed federal background checks for most gun sales.
[Graeme Wood: Where were the police?]
After mass shootings like the massacre of elementary-school children in Uvalde, Texas, last month, many people wonder why renewing such firearm restrictions on the federal level now seems impossible. Although many states have passed new restrictions, the possibility of federal legislation, even on the most popular proposals, remains remote.
There’s more than one explanation., even with that discrepancy, “the American public leans toward support for the commonly discussed middle-of-the-road gun reforms.” The 1994 ban passed before bills in the Senate were filibustered as a matter of course, forcing just about any legislation to garner at least 60 votes. In the current 50-50 Senate, that is extremely unlikely.
