This isn’t 1994
Ask Democratic leaders why they have been reluctant until recently to make gun control a core issue, and the conversation eventually leads to 1994.
That year, Democrats lost control of the House for the first time since the early 1950s, just eight weeks after President Bill Clinton signed a ban on semi-automatic assault weapons. That ban came nearly a year after Clinton signed the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, better known as the Brady Bill. The National Rifle Association claimed credit for the Democratic wipeout, and its allies—still, 24 years later—invoke “#1994” as a warning to anyone who thinks about advancing gun-control measures.
But as a Clinton administration official who helped lead our efforts to win passage of these two measures a generation ago, I have always been skeptical of the idea that the Democrats’ support for popular and common-sense gun restrictions were the critical element of the 1994 election losses. More important, I am absolutely confident that in 2018 the politicians who should fear the NRA are not Democrats who confront it, but suburban Republicans headed for defeat because of their alliance with it.
Let’s start by debunking the NRA’s monster-under-the-bed notion that they were the cause of the Democratic Party’s devastation in 1994. In fact, there were many causes: an ailing economy, Democrats’ votes for an unpopular tax increase, anti-immigrant sentiment in California and Arizona, and the failure of the Clinton health-care plan.
The NRA has turned itself into an affiliate of the GOP. The NRA backed 115 Democratic candidates for Congress in 1992, 65 in 2010, but only four in 2016. The NRA’s video messages are no longer about gun rights; they instead rail against the Oscars, the media, university elites—essentially providing air cover for President Donald Trump’s Twitter ravings. The group gave its Courage Under Fire Award to the chairman of the FCC for repealing net neutrality—a GOP cause, not a concern of gun owners. All this may be an effort to cement an alliance with a Republican president who once supported an assault-weapons ban. The NRA may still be a colossus within the GOP, but it increasingly offers little common ground with even the most conservative Democrats, traditionally a key to the GOP’s legislative victories.
As the astute political observer Ronald Brownstein recently argued, it is not Democrats who should fear the NRA, but instead Republicans, for how the gun-rights group could bring an abrupt end to their careers. Pro-NRA Republicans in suburban congressional districts are most at risk of losing this fall. And grass-roots Democrats are far more united in supporting new gun-control measures than Republicans are in opposing them.
As far as Democrats are concerned, the NRA is no longer the 800-pound gorilla of American politics. It may prove to be a 1,000-pound anvil around Republicans’ necks in November.