On both sides, Republicans block any gun control, and Democrats only propose useless legislation

This has been said about many issues in the past.

Which issues? Civil Rights? Gay marriage?

Those are issues in which the American people were opposed, and then societal views changed. As you pointed out, that isn't the case here. Americans already favor reform, but they aren't going to vote these people out based on the status quo.

Newtown was the wake up call, if nothing changes after a bunch of small children get massacred, you're not getting change. Not without wholesale changes. Proposing an AWB is political theater, nothing more.

Americans support gun control. Only our crappy political system stands in the way.

What do you think the other person meant when they said, "It’s never passing through this Congress, and if it ever did, the Supreme Court would strike it down."?

That's the opposite situation. Pro-life voters and pro-gin voters are the 2 largest single-issue voting groups in the country.

Look at it this way. If you swapped Trump and Biden's positions on abortion but changed nothing else, how many pro-choice Democrats would have voted for Trump?

Basically zero, right. Meanwhile, millions of pro-life Republicans would have flipped because abortion is the singular issue upon which they base their vote.

Guns are in the same boat. Hundreds of thousands of voters vote strictly based on their love of guns. There's no political advantage in the general election for being anti-gun, and the Dems are sacrificing a whole lot of seats to fight this losing battle.

Yeah nevermind that the constitution says "shall not be infringed"' If abortion rights were in the constitution there would be no way of banning it, just as it is with firearms.

Roe had good results, but it wasn't a good decision.

Casual observers of the Supreme Court who came to the Law School to hear Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg speak about Roe v. Wade likely expected a simple message from the longtime defender of reproductive and women’s rights: Roe was a good decision.

Those more acquainted with Ginsburg and her thoughtful, nuanced approach to difficult legal questions were not surprised, however, to hear her say just the opposite, that Roe was a faulty decision. For Ginsburg, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision that affirmed a woman’s right to an abortion was too far-reaching and too sweeping, and it gave anti-abortion rights activists a very tangible target to rally against in the four decades since.

Ginsburg and Professor Geoffrey Stone, a longtime scholar of reproductive rights and constitutional law, spoke for 90 minutes before a capacity crowd in the Law School auditorium on May 11 on “Roe v. Wade at 40.”

“My criticism of Roe is that it seemed to have stopped the momentum on the side of change,” Ginsburg said. She would’ve preferred that abortion rights be secured more gradually, in a process that included state legislatures and the courts, she added. Ginsburg also was troubled that the focus on Roe was on a right to privacy, rather than women’s rights.

“Roe isn’t really about the woman’s choice, is it?” Ginsburg said. “It’s about the doctor’s freedom to practice…it wasn’t woman-centered, it was physician-centered.”

https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/justice-ruth-bader-ginsburg-offers-critique-roe-v-wade-during-law-school-visit

Yes, there's no way Roe would have been overturned by that Congress or that Supreme Court (50 years ago). Just like this Congress and Court will not allow significant gun control. Republicans gerrymandered districts and refused to seat a justice, thereby changing those things. Thank you for proving my point.

Advocate for shit that would actually change things.

What do you propose?

I guess I'd ask you the same question. I don't have a proposal because I don't think any of it will make it through Congress. And if it somehow made it through Congress, the Supreme Court would strike it as unconstitutional.

Short of voting out these members of Congress and balancing the court, there's no hope of reform. So drop the issue to appeal to more voters. Win more elections, balance the court, then you're in a position to effect change.

Also, AWBs are pretty useless. They tend to grandfather in existing weapons and they exclude handguns, which are the weapon used most often to commit murder. Magazine limits, which were in the 1994 law, were the only piece to show a genuine reduction in violent crimes.

Enforce our ban on domestic abusers owning firearms. We already passed it, but no one enforces it. It would eliminate a huge chunk of gun violence in the nation, but its not as appealing to the mob as the "assault style" ban.

Republicans block efforts for increased healthcare of any kind let alone mental health. They also block preventative measures like red flag laws.

It’s not a mental health issue. There are people with mental health issues all over the civilized world and those countries don’t deal with mass shootings weekly, even if the citizens are allowed access to guns. It’s the relatively unrestricted access to firearms with minimal to no oversight of gun owners, and no rules to secure said firearms.

Edit: well, here we go again.

https://abc7.com/unlv-active-shooter/14148302/

It's also a lightning rod issue that turns more voters away than it attracts.

Sure there are staunch anti-gun people under the Democrats' tent but they're not the kind of people who will vote Republican if the party suddenly scaled back or ended its decades long futile efforts at gun bans.

On the other hand there are a ton of white working class voters on the suburban-rural fringes of swing states who would absolutely at least consider a Democrat if the party wasn't so easily cast as "gun grabbers and job killers who only care about minorities".

You get a pro-union, pro-legal-gun Democrat on a ticket who speaks on issues affecting rural whites as much as they do urban non-white voters (who are equally important), and you'd have a winner in many of these areas where they've been quite red, but not so rabidly Trumpy as other areas.

Even moreso if that's a change that happened at the party/platform level.

I feel like from a campaign strategy standpoint, guns are just a lose-lose for the Democratic party. Playing to a base that would be loyal anyway for other reasons, even if the party dropped that position completely (which would not only eliminate a deal breaker issue for rural Democrats but also eliminate a cornerstone of the GOP platform in "protecting the second amendment"). Unless they did a complete about face and suddenly became as cozy with the NRA as Republicans, anti-gun voters might be upset, but they're still voting blue.

After all there's still abortion, electoral reform, racial justice, the environment, education, foreign policy, infrastructure, legal weed, LGBT rights, healthcare, and a host of other issues where the Dems are still their people.

Are you under the impression the politics of 1994 are remotely similar to 2023? Have you read the Supreme Court cases of Heller (2008) or Bruen (2022)?

Name call all you want, but you're the one tragically out of touch. This Congress, especially the Republican majority in the house would NEVER pass this bill. SCOTUS has completely changed gun rights in this country since 2008. First finding an individual right to gun ownership, then drastically reducing those gun limitations that are allowable under the 2nd amendment.

I suggest you do some reading before spouting nonsense. Your comment somehow states the bill is simultaneously "entirely new" and also the "same damn thing". Muppet.

Disagree. The solution is to push for as much gun control as possible,

That's essentially nothing.

...until eventually the dam breaks and the 2A dies.

And I think elephants should fart rainbows, but both of our proposals lack any consideration of how we make that happen.

In the long run, gun ownership in the US will resemble how it works in other Western countries, which is to say not much at all.

Eventually? There are roughly 400 million guns in this country...how many generations is "eventually"?

I'm not even disagreeing with you, but hoping doesn't make it happen. How do we get there? What are the steps? Does your projected path take into account the systemic impediments?