Arms Control Law Remains a Pipe Dream

In America, where the Bible and the shotgun continue to dominate vast areas and wide strips of the population, even initiating a discussion on gun control can be an important victory. The Democrats, together with 16 Republicans, vote to “break obstructionism.” Obama congratulates himself. The relatives of the victims hope. But the agreement remains far away.

The vote has come after a long-desired agreement between Democratic Senator Joe Manchin and two Republicans, Pat Toomey and Mark Kirk, who envisage background checks and stricter controls on any commercial transaction that involves a gun, even those between private parties and at local fairs. The measure has been harshly criticized by the National Rifle Association, the gun lobby, which has found itself confronting an about-face of two of its most secure political champions, Toomey and Manchin, who have never before placed doubt on their pro-gun orthodoxy. Manchin, a Democrat who comes from West Virginia, a rural and conservative state, had appeared directly in an electoral spot embracing a shotgun and denouncing Barack Obama’s energy reform.

Things changed, though, especially after the latest massacres in Aurora and Newtown. Even the allies of the NRA are starting to discuss the power of pistols and shotguns in America. Their proposal, which Manchin calls “common sense,” will be voted on along with others, such as that of another pair, Democrat Patrick Leahy and Republican Susan Collins, which aims to enforce stricter penalties for arms trafficking. The other project, sponsored by Barack Obama and another Democratic senator, Diane Feinstein, who wanted to ban assault weapons, seems to have no chance.

The fact that the discussion is open in the Senate does not mean, though, that a law will be reached. Harry Reid himself knows this well; having acknowledged the important victory, he also added: “The hard work starts now.” After the Senate vote, an eventual law needs to be passed in the house, where the Republicans have the majority and where opposition to any measure that slightly undermines the Second Amendment is, at the moment, absolutely prevalent. And yet it is not even granted that the Senate will find the votes to pass the measure. Many Democrats, especially those of the central and southern states, in particular those who are running in the 2014 mid-term elections, do not seem to have any intention of burning their political careers by making war on the gun lobby.

In many of them the memory of 1994 still burns, when support for Bill Clinton’s ban of assault weapons cost many Democrats re-election. Six years later at the 2000 presidential elections, Al Gore lost three states that were considered sure things — West Virginia, Arkansas and Tennessee, his own state — after a deluge of negative television spots paid for by the NRA. The NRA certainly now has reduced its power and its capacity for political influence but remains nonetheless strong in the most rural and conservative areas of America. Hence at least six Democratic senators who have voted to block Republican obstructionism and initiate the debate — Max Baucus of Montana, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Mark Begich of Alaska, Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota — will find it difficult to give their votes to a law for gun control.

The position of these Democrats has been summarized by Heitkamp herself, having received in her Senate office the families of the victims of the Newtown massacre, who asked her for stricter controls on the sale of pistols and shotguns and a ban on high-capacity magazines. To fathers and mothers of the children killed, Heitkamp said that she respected their pain but that in North Dakota, gun control “isn’t an issue. This is a way of life. This is how people feel … I’m going to represent my state.”