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.

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.

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.

If dems got off the 2A stuff they would get more voters ::cough cough:: Texas. I know people that are like yeah abortion is not a deal breaker for me but guns are. Mostly people who are too old to have kids anyway. I'm sure Mass shooting will go down once we have social nets to get people the help they need. Guns are like Cars. Fine when used by responsible adults baaaad otherwise. No one does these things because they have happy content lives.

It's not even that, it's shocking to me because most of the people who love guns are on the side of the fascists anyway. Fight the government? They're going to vote for the authoritarians.

So the US has never had any issue with guerilla warfare when the adversaries had mostly small arms? Cool it with the American exceptionalism.