Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle’s “Insight” section had a very good article titled “The Politics of Gun Control,” which I recommend that you read. One of the main points of the article is that we on the side of controlling guns and ammo are victims of what I would call a “fervor gap.” This quote from the final paragraphs of the article explains:
But why do the so-called "assault weapons" have so much political power in the United States of 2012? Because the minority of people who want these weapons available care deeply about such gun policies. The majority of Americans support a ban on such weapons, but they don't really care much about the subject.
Thus, the intensity of feeling by gun control's opponents is the trump card in the modern politics of gun control. Whatever sentiments that mass shootings provoke in the nominal supporters of gun control, they don't seem to run very deep or very long. Most of the moderates and liberals who support gun control care more about other issues.
That both defines the problem gun control advocates face and shows why they react with passionate immediacy to mass shootings. Their real hope - the thing that would really make "this time" different in the moral career of American gun control - is not that the gun lobby would care less or see reason, it is rather the hope of increasing the salience of gun control to moderate and liberal constituencies.
The sense of insecurity that comes when schoolrooms and shopping centers and multiplex movie theaters become shooting galleries for the unhinged inspires fear out of proportion to the statistical risks it represents. But not for very long. And that has undermined the ability to mobilize the public concerns into gun control policy.
