It wasn’t long ago that you couldn’t turn a corner without seeing a Democrat saying something about “common-sense gun reform” or “gun safety” or whatever buzzword the media had taught the trained seals to say that week. Now, Democrats have gone suspiciously quiet on the issue.
It hasn’t been because shootings have stopped. According to AP News, a number of shootings have been reported on in just the last few hours as of this writing, one of them taking place at a school where officers shot an armed student.
Normally, when innocents are shot up, the news is all over it. Radio host and gun rights activist Dana Loesch once said that the media loves mass shootings, and she was proven right time and again. Not to say they love the idea of people being shot, but the moment a body hits the floor from a gunshot wound, the leftist media, politicians, and activists stand on top of it and use it a soapbox before it even has a chance to get cold.
If you don’t believe me, the moment you hear about a mass shooting, search Twitter for keywords. You’ll find a slew of blue checks have already used it to promote some form of gun control.
Oddly enough, most of the talk about it has stopped. Why?
The canaries in the coal mine known as Beto O’Rourke and Eric Swalwell.
Both of these men were gung-ho about gun control and based their platforms around the issue. O’Rourke and his “hell yes” attitude about taking your guns, and Swalwell saying the quiet part out loud and mentioning nuking gun owners if they don’t cooperate didn’t resonate well with voters in the least.
They’re now gone from the 2020 lineup, and every other Democrat learned that if they want to keep their numbers up, they need to stay far away from talking about gun control.
According to Stephen Gutowski at the Washington Free Beacon, monitoring the cable news interviews of Democrats has shown a decline in mentions of leftist talk about gun control, including oft used buzzwords. The dropoff hasn’t been small, either:
A Free Beacon review of cable news interviews confirmed that mentions of gun control have declined. In the time between former candidate Beto O’Rourke’s pivot to gun confiscation and the end of his campaign, the terms “gun control” and “gun safety” were mentioned an average of 19 times per day. In the time between the end of O’Rourke’s campaign and the November Democratic debate, they were only mentioned seven times per day on average.
The nearly three-fold drop in discussion of the gun issue on cable news coincides with a drop in candidates mentioning it during interviews. Candidates were four times more likely to mention guns during cable news interviews between the mass shooting in El Paso on August 3 and the last day of O’Rourke’s campaign on October 31. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.), billionaire Tom Steyer, and Sen. Kamala Harris (D., Calif.) were the only candidates who mentioned guns in cable news interviews after O’Rourke dropped out.
This decline may reflect other trends, including a fall in the number of mass shootings and an increase in media attention on impeachment. Gun-rights proponents, however, interpreted the findings as a shift in priorities.
Gun control is an issue that really only works in the moment. If, God forbid, a mass shooting happens at an elementary school where small children died then you would definitely see Democrats ride the wave of outrage and bring the issue back to the forefront and begin painting it as the fault of the NRA, the Republican party, Donald Trump, and foolish gun owners who consider their rights more important than people’s safety.
However, the key to that door is the emotions of the public, who are rightly horrified by such events, be they at an elementary school or not. Anger makes people malleable to suggestions and Democrats know that. You’ll notice a lot of their forward movement is based on making people angry about an issue and outraged mobs.
The problem is that anger doesn’t persist for most and once it subsides, people go back to thinking about their rights with a rational mind. The window closes for Democrats who then once again are forced to put the issue away.
That doesn’t say a lot for the gun control issue overall. If you have to rely on shock and rage to get people to agree on a point with you, then your stance isn’t very good. If a majority of people calm down, see it with a more level head and think that maybe they thought too rashly before, then wisdom dictates you stay away from that idea.
Democrats aren’t concerned with wisdom, they’re concerned with power.
Gutowski does add that Michael Bloomberg’s entrance into the 2020 race may raise the issue of gun control in the mainstream again. He is the creator of Everytown, a very well funded and organized anti-gun group. However, without a bloody backdrop, I’m not sure how much his anti-gun presence will affect mainstream Democrat thought.
