Yet the needle of public opinion is moving the wrong way. CBS News found that support for stricter guns laws dropped from 57 percent to 47 percent, and CNN from 52 percent to 43 percent. An ABC News/Washington Post poll had support slipping only from 54 percent to 52 percent, but that’s still lower than the support it found for gay marriage.
The headline on a CNN story on the latest trend in polling was titled, Polls Suggest Congress Might Have Waited Too Long on Gun Control. It has waited all of four months. …
The gun control debate has shown the president again to be hopelessly detached as a legislative mechanic and ineffectual as a shaper of public opinion. Before writing rhetorical checks that his own party’s majority leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, couldn’t cash, the president might have at least consulted with the wily old son-of-a-gun about what was plausible and adjusted accordingly. He might have taken into consideration Reid’s ribbon-cutting ceremony with National Rifle Association honcho Wayne LaPierre at the Clark County Shooting Park in Las Vegas in 2010. …
What we are talking about now is trying to keep guns out of the hands of common criminals. This is obviously a worthy and important goal, although the most direct means of doing it — stop-and-frisk policing in areas where gun crime is most likely to occur — is anathema to the same people who say we have to do everything we can to save even one life.
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