2,405 Shot Dead Since Tucson

by Andrew Romano
The Daily Beast

If you believe the conventional wisdom, this strategy makes a certain sense: Why distract the electorate with a wedge issue when the economy is shaky and the Middle East is blowing up? But what if the chattering class is wrong? What if Obama is missing a rare opportunity? As much as he might like to move on, the issue isn’t going away—nor should it. On March 4, a federal grand jury returned a 49-count indictment against Loughner, to which he has pleaded not guilty; a few days later, authorities released autopsies of his victims. Last week doctors revealed that Giffords is now walking, speaking in full sentences, and planning to attend her husband’s shuttle launch in April.

The wires, meanwhile, were filled with reports of fatal shootings: at a Sanger, California, birthday party; a Georgia apartment complex; a San Antonio carwash. All told, an estimated 2,405 Americans have been shot and killed since Tucson, adding to the grim toll of 400,000 felled by guns since Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated in 1968. (The estimate of gun murders and accidental deaths is based on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.)

Gun-safety advocates would argue that Obama has a moral duty to stanch the bleeding, and that may be true. But what’s particularly interesting right now isn’t the moral equation. It’s the practical one. Look beyond the hoary Washington logic, and it’s clear that the present moment may be peculiar enough, and the forces at work potent enough, to produce real movement on gun safety—provided Obama proceeds carefully. That means no outlawing specific guns. No relitigating the Second Amendment. And no frantic liberal overreach. Just two precautions that a majority of voters favor, according to a new Newsweek-Daily Beast Poll: background checks for every gun buyer (which 86 percent of respondents support) and a revival of the recently lapsed ban on the kind of high-capacity clips that Loughner used in Arizona (which 51 percent support).

If Obama came out in favor of these modest reforms, he’d have libertarians (such as the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy), Republicans (Rep. Peter King), independents (Bloomberg), and Democrats (Sen. Frank Lautenberg) on his side. Even Dick Cheney, a longtime hunter and NRA supporter, now admits that “maybe it’s appropriate to reestablish” limits on “the size of the magazine that you can buy to go with semiautomatic weapons.” The diversity of this group reflects a simple truth: that the vast majority of us have more in common with Goddard than with the two-dimensional culture warriors—the latte-sipping elites, the paranoid survivalists—who have dominated the debate for decades.

We respect guns, gun owners, and the Second Amendment, and yet we want gun violence to be as rare as possible. We know that guns can contribute to a community’s safety, and yet we acknowledge that none of the 18 mass shootings since May 2007 was stopped by a legal-handgun carrier. If Obama recognizes this reality, and takes action, it’s possible to imagine us having a grownup conversation about guns for the first time in almost 20 years.

(More here.)

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