House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer admits that Democrats are conceding the gun issue to Republicans for now.
Republicans have been increasingly using pro-gun amendments to throw a wrench into Democratic legislation, attaching amendments to seemingly unrelated bills allowing for expanded gun carrying privileges in national parks.
The tactic seems to be working, with Democrats acknowledging that pro-gun members rule in both chambers.
"There clearly is a majority in both houses that the Second Amendment rights ... that relate to the national parks are too restricted," Hoyer told reporters Tuesday. "The reality is that a majority in both houses agree with that position."
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http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0509/22703.html#ixzz0G0Dyn7Tq&ALast week, 27 Senate Democrats joined Republicans to pass an amendment that allows concealed weapons in national parks.
This week, the Senate could take the first step toward overturning a gun control bill passed by their own Democratic brethren more than a decade ago.
After a soul-searching exile, the Democratic Party that regained control of both Congress and the White House in the past two election cycles is proving in many ways to be a distinctly different breed than the one that last ruled the capital.
Nowhere has that transformation become more evident than on the issue of gun control, which was promoted by Democrats in 1992 to attract suburban voters and abandoned by Democrats in 2008 to gain support among rural voters.
The Senate Veterans Affairs Committee is expected on Thursday to advance the Veterans Second Amendment Protection Act, which is being co-sponsored by Sens. Jim Webb (D-Va.) and Richard Burr (R-N.C.).
The legislation would overturn a section of the law that prohibits veterans who are unable to manage their finances from obtaining a firearm. The bill maintains a 1990s gun restriction on veterans found to be a danger to themselves and others.
Asked about the legislation, Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, sighed. “I don’t understand why it’s needed,” Helmke said, adding that there’s an appeals process for veterans who feel they have been unfairly denied guns.
“The Supreme Court has said, yes, there are rights, there are gun rights. The Supreme Court has also said there are responsibilities. This bill goes beyond gun rights and overlooks responsibilities,” he added.
Several political forces are driving the Democratic gun control conversion.
The most obvious one is that gun control turned out to be a losing issue for dozens of Democrats.
Republicans gained 54 House seats in 1994, in part because of voter backlash at the passing of an assault weapons ban and other gun measures.
A major force behind those victories was the National Rifle Association, an organization that has ebbed from the headlines but still holds considerable political influence.
“The NRA and its allies have succeeded in making the slippery slope argument stick,” said Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky. “Any form of gun control is a step in the direction of outlawing guns. People have heard that for so many years, it’s become a very hard thing for Democrats to go against.”
NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam said simply: “Our job is to monitor them and make sure they vote the right way.”
More broadly, allegiance to gun control was constraining the party’s efforts to claw back on top.
Even if the Democrats could win all the House seats in the urban areas and liberal enclaves, it wouldn’t be enough for a majority. The party had to find a way to accommodate conservatives, and it aggressively did so in the past two cycles.
Now, “there are a lot of Democrats, primarily from rural states, for whom the Second Amendment is an article of faith,” Cross said.
Finally, party leaders realized the issue shouldn’t be narrowly viewed as a regional concern — or even a strictly conservative one. Former DNC Chairman Howard Dean is a pro-gun liberal; Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is a pro-gun moderate.
Key states in the presidential contest, such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, are often won or lost on the margins, and the gun issue is powerful enough to make that difference, said John Anzalone, a Democratic political adviser.
For all those reasons, said one Democratic adviser, “an internal détente that has been declared before the pro-gun and pro-gun-control forces within the Democratic caucus.”
The post-exile Democratic pivot was made even easier as gun control and crime dimmed as a concern among voters.
An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll from April reported 53 percent of Americans backed a ban on assault weapons. That’s down from 75 percent in May 1991.
A Gallup Poll from last year shows 49 percent of Americans wanted stricter gun laws, compared with 70 percent in 1993.
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