While other outlets are calculating exactly when gun control died on the federal lave, New York Magazine (NYMAG) is saying hold your horses! Gun control isn’t dead. Heck, “honest deliberations about gun control have not even begun.”
Learning heavily on The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, NYMAG claims the only constant in the gun control debate is disagreement. To boltster their point they quote Gopnik, who said, “on the problem of gun control, no matter how far we seem from a sane solution, the pubic deliberations are finished.”
But NYMAG disagrees. They actually believe meaningful and “honest deliberations…have not even begun.”
They do admit that support for gun control has fallen by referencing a Gallop poll that showed support for more gun control fell from 78 percent in 1990 to 58 percent just after Sandy Hook to 47 percent at the end of 2014. So the trend is clearly against gun control. NYMAG then turns around and cites a “year-old Rasmussen poll showing 59 percent of Americans favored a ban on semi-automatic weapons, like the [AR-15] Adam Lanza used in Sandy Hook.”
In the months that followed Sandy Ho0k parents traveled to DC to argue for more gun control. One parent, Mark Mattioli, stood in contrast to other Sandy Hook parents by arguing against more gun control. He said: “Criminals aren’t going to hand [the guns] back. So why should I be hampered in protecting myself when someone can come to my home and outgun me?” Other Sandy Hook families also distanced themselves from the gun control push, albeit not as vocally as Mark Mattioli.
And time proved that the Rasmussen poll favoring a ban on semi-automatics (AR-15s) was less an accurate reading of what the American people wanted and more an indicator of the American emotional distress at that moment. Just a few months later–in April–Senator Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) “assault weapons ban” went down in flames. And Senator Joe Manchin’s (D-WV) far-reaching gun control was rejected as well.
Gabby Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly continued their gun control push for another 16 months anyway. Touring the country to find candidates who would support gun control, releasing books explaining the gun control measures they supported, and dispersing funds from the their PAC–Americans for Responsible Solutions–to gun control candidates in the 2014 midterms. They barely won fifty percent of the races in which they were involved and actually lost the most important one–Giffords former Congressional seat in Arizona District 2 went to pro-gun Representative Martha McSally (R-AZ-2).
But NYMAG says “honest deliberations on gun control have not even begun.”
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