Fascinating messaging in a midterm cycle where (a) the economy is the entire focus, and (b) where the recently passed bill responding to recent shootings is one of the few achievements Joe Biden can claim. In poll after poll, voters make economic issues their main focus, and gun policy among the tertiary-if-best policies relating to their vote. To the extent they care about it, Biden might have benefited from taking credit for the negotiated Chris Murphy-John Cornyn bill.
Instead, here’s Biden touting the bill to some extent, but emphasizing that he thinks it won’t solve the problem:
“Assault weapons need to be banned,” Biden says while calling for common sense measures. https://t.co/XMWsOIzysO pic.twitter.com/HiAu3VsOFx
— CBS News (@CBSNews) July 11, 2022
Biden spoke to a crowd of hundreds of lawmakers, advocates and relatives of gun violence victims on the South Lawn of the White House to mark the passage and signing last month of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act in the wake of a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that left nearly 20 children dead.
At the end of his remarks, Biden acknowledged more needed to be done, focusing in particular on the availability of high-powered weapons.
“We’re living in a country awash in weapons of war,” Biden said. “What is the rationale for these weapons outside war zones?”
“Assault weapons need to be banned,” Biden continued. “They were banned. I led the fight in 1994. And then under pressure from the NRA and the gun manufacturers and others, that ban was lifted in 2004. In that 10 years it was law, mass shootings went down.”
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“I’m determined to ban these weapons again and high capacity magazines… I’m not going to stop until we do it,” the president added.
That may be a popular position in the Beltway. It’s not too popular in general, anyway, and for good reason. The assault-weapons ban of 1994 used arbitrary designations for which weapons actually qualified for sale and which did not, a determination largely made on the basis of looks rather than capacity. Its ten-year run didn’t have any impact on mass shootings, mainly because the kind of mass shootings that grab this kind of media focus are extremely rare, and its expiration didn’t have any impact on it either.
A Quinnipiac poll from just after the Uvalde shooting showed that support had actually hit a new low in their series:
Half of Americans (50 percent) support a nationwide ban on the sale of assault weapons, while 45 percent oppose it.
In today’s poll, 50 percent of registered voters support a nationwide ban on the sale of assault weapons, while 45 percent oppose it. This is the lowest level of support among registered voters for a nationwide ban on the sale of assault weapons since February 2013 when the question was first asked by the Quinnipiac University Poll. The highest level of support among registered voters for a nationwide ban on the sale of assault weapons was in a Quinnipiac poll on February 20, 2018 when 67 percent supported a ban and 29 percent opposed.
In other words, this is not just a tertiary-if-best topic with voters right now, it’s still a political loser for Biden. The more he keeps raising his desire to pass this bill, the higher he raises expectations among progressives that he will “fight” to get it. With that, it would be yet another issue on which Biden will end up losing, turning this even more into an example of snatching defeat from the jaws of a mild victory in getting the first shooting-response bill in at least a decade through Congress.
Biden just stepped all over one of the very few claims to competence he has … and made his fellow Democrats on Capitol Hill look impotent in the process. Small wonder that Democrats are now abandoning Biden in droves.
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