How come Republicans don't support gun control anymore?

Looking at those names from 1993 is like fingering pottery shards from a once-robust civilization, now in ruins. Of the 10 yes votes, six came from Rhode Island, Vermont, Delaware, Oregon, and Colorado. Those states don’t have Republican senators anymore. In the presidential elections of the 1970s and 1980s, Oregon, Vermont, Delaware, and Colorado were almost always red; Rhode Island fluctuated between the parties. Last fall, Barack Obama won each handily.

But that’s only half the story. It’s not just that states that are now bright blue once elected moderate Republicans to the Senate. Conservative states used to elect Republican moderates too. The other four Republicans who backed the assault-weapons ban were Missouri’s John Danforth, Kansas’s Nancy Kassebaum, and Richard Lugar and Dan Coats from Indiana. What happened to each is instructive. Danforth soon left the Senate, and later condemned his party’s “fixation on a religious agenda.” He called last year’s Republican primary debates “embarrassing.” For her part, Kassebaum endorsed Chuck Hagel’s nomination to be Defense secretary, a nomination that most current Senate Republicans not only opposed but filibustered. A year ago, a Tea Party challenger defeated Lugar in the GOP primary. In his concession statement, Lugar warned that if the kind of ideological zealotry that defeated him “expands in the Republican Party, we will be relegated to minority status.” Six months later, a Democrat claimed Lugar’s seat. Of the four, only Coats remains in the Senate. (Actually, he left and returned.) But he now opposes any new limitations on gun ownership, despite having voted for them repeatedly in the 1990s.