The Gun Debate Needs to Break Old Patterns
Assault-weapons bans and other familiar proposals would have little effect, and therefore have lukewarm public support. Advocates should focus on practical measures, like red-flag laws.
Again and again.
Photographer: Allison Dinner/AFP via Getty ImagesThe mass murder of children in Uvalde, Texas, coming just 10 days after the mass murder of shoppers in Buffalo, New York, moved former Senator Bill Frist — who was the majority leader of a Republican Senate when President George W. Bush was in the White House — to issue a statement on guns: “We can find ways to preserve the Second Amendment while also safeguarding the lives of our children. ... The time to act is now.”
The impulse to overcome long-standing divisions to find solutions is laudable. But the assumption behind Frist’s comment, and much of the rest of the national discussion of gun crime, is that progress is mostly a matter of getting enough Americans to have the right sentiments.