Now that we really can sit back and relax about last year’s election result, Gun-control Nation can begin beating the drums for the passage of a new gun bill. And this time we have a friend in the Oval Office who says he wants a new gun bill too.  So, what are the odds that a gun bill might really come about?

              Getting a gun bill onto Joe’s desk won’t be all that easy, given that the blue team would need 100% support from its own members, as well as 10 additional votes from the red side. And nobody seems to think that right now there are more than a couple of members of the Senate GOP caucus who are willing to make such a move. 

              But next year might be different. Next year is an election year. Next year there may be some GOP Senators who will read the tea leaves in their states and decide that being pro-gun isn’t such a smart way to go. Gun control certainly played a role in the blue team’s smashing House victory in 2018. Did Biden’s gun-control stance in 2020 make a difference for him? WTFK?

              The Federal Government has passed four gun-control bills: 1934, 1938, 1968 and 1994. The Democrat(ic) Party controlled both chambers of Congress as well as the Oval Office all four times. And even though most of the House and Senate members from the Confederacy (why did we take those states back?) voted against the bills, there were enough Democrats and even a few Republicans from the other 37 states to get the job done.

              The deciding factor in all four votes was that the bills were initially introduced in response to an attempted, and in one instance, a successful assassination of a sitting President: Roosevelt was almost gunned down in 1933, JFK was killed in 1963 and Reagan was wounded in 1981.

              This time around, the media is promoting the idea that a gun bill might get through Congress because shootings, and particularly mass shootings, are going way up. Just yesterday there was a bad shooting of a doctor, his wife, two grandchildren and two HVAC installers in South Carolina, and all the news reports mentioned the possible approval of a new gun bill.

              In the last ten years, there have been 19 shootings in which 20 or more people were wounded or killed. Drop the victim count down to 18 and you can add 6 more. I’m not taking about mass shootings in which 4 people get shot, which is the criteria used by various gun-control organizations and scholars to count the number of such events. I’m talking about 18 victims adding up to a grand total of 1,448!

              Believe me, I’m not hoping that we get a gun bill because someone takes a pot-shot at Joe. But I’m not assuming that the recent spike in gun violence during the Covid-19 pandemic will provide the public opinion impetus for a new law. When Joe proposed some new executive actions to regulate guns, he said that gun violence was a ‘national, public health crisis.’  Know how long I’ve been hearing that one?

              Generally speaking, the media treats a shooting, even a mass shooting, like a big pileup on the Texas interstate, or a California forest fire, or a hurricane that slams the Gulf Coast, or a tornado that rips through wherever tornados rip through. in other words, shootings are like natural disasters. And natural disasters happen all the time so the best thing to do is just duck.

              Joe says that gun violence is a ‘national crisis.’ But in 2019, more than half the people who were victims of gun homicides lived in just 15 states. Which states? The 13 Confederate states plus throw in a couple of border states like West Virginia and Tennessee. Like I said above, why did we ever take them back?

              Joe wants to spend a trillion dollars on infrastructure. Why don’t we make reducing gun violence an infrastructure priority just like repairing a bridge or paving a road?