Democrats can’t stop shooting themselves in the foot on gun control. Their mistake is that they refuse to connect their push for more firearm restrictions with, well, everything else they are doing.
The Democratic approach to guns is to wait until there is a mass shooting and then demand more gun control. But the narrow logic of their argument — that we should ban, or at least further restrict, the weapons used to commit the latest mass murder — is undermined by what Democrats do the rest of the time.
Except for those who are already ideologically committed to it, gun control is a high-trust proposal. People keep and bear arms to defend themselves, and so persuading citizens to limit or even give up their guns requires persuading them that they do not need them for protection. But voters do not view Democrats as prioritizing a country with low crime and high social trust. Rather, Democrats are seen as the soft-on-crime party, with a left flank that is committed to insane defund-the-police policies.
When Democratic prosecutors refuse to prosecute, when Democratic politicians enact revolving-door bail policies for violent criminals, when Democratic mouthpieces insist that violent and threatening lunatics on public transit should be accepted as a normal part of life, they are telling people they are on their own. And many Americans have gotten the message; the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots sold a lot of guns, many of them to new gun owners.
If Democrats want to convince Americans
