Dem Rep. Jan Schakowsky: I’m not so sure we can’t ban handguns entirely

In which Jason Mattera discovers Schakowsky’s Nixonian side. Watching this reminded me of the videos that circulated during the ObamaCare debate of high-profile liberals confessing publicly that single-payer is the ultimate goal of universal health care. In both cases, they’re pushing regulations that are less ambitious than they’d prefer because they’ve concluded that only an incrementalist approach can get them to their final destination. Then I remembered: Schakowsky was one of the people in the ObamaCare videos too. No matter how dark your suspicions are of the Democrats’ true agenda, there she is, happy to confirm on camera that you’re dead right. Note to Jason M.: Next time you see her, ask her what she thinks about the possibility of Obama firing drone missiles at American citizens sitting in a cafe. I’m almost afraid to see how she’d answer.

Nice to see everyone on the same page, though, in acknowledging that banning “assault weapons” won’t do much and thus any serious gun-grabber has to be looking at handguns. (Note Bloomy’s bit about that in the second clip below, via the Weekly Standard.) Is it feasible, though? I’m thinking … no:

That’s from a Gallup poll taken just two weeks after the Sandy Hook massacre, when you’d expect the backlash to gun rights to be at its zenith. Interestingly, despite a leftward trend to many other issues over the last few years, support for the basic right to own a gun keeps going up, up, up. Which is not to say there’s no reason to worry: We’re one conservative Supreme Court retirement away from the Heller decision on the Second Amendment being reversed, which would once again give blue jurisdictions the power to ban guns outright. But, barring a dramatic reversal in poll trends, you’ll never see a national ban. Even now, red-state Democrats are sweating over Obama’s relatively minor gun-control push; a Senate deal on expanded background checks, the most overwhelmingly popular element of the gun-control agenda, just collapsed. The real potential battleground in the future, I think, is over semiautomatics. Could Democrats build support for a ban on those, or some of those, if they’re careful in their rhetoric to respect the right to own a revolver or, a la Shotgun Joe Biden, a 12-gauge? Better question: Given the Schakowsky-types in the caucus, would anyone on the fence be stupid enough to give them the benefit of the doubt on that?

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