Where's the Debate Over Gun Control?

Posted by Liliana Segura, AlterNet at 1:10 PM on February 22, 2008.

The campus shooting at Northern Illinois University may be old news by now, but forgive me for thinking it might have presented an opportunity at last night's debate for someone to ask Hillary or Obama about gun control. Can you remember the last time either candidate talked about it? The last time any Democratic presidential contender did? Thinking "Dems" and "guns" leaves me with images of John Kerry in a hunting outfit. Embarrassing.

Gun control used to be one of those bread and butter issues for Democrats, but recent years have seen the party's rapid evolution towards staunch protectors of the 2nd Amendement. When the Clinton-era assault weapons ban passed expired three years back, few in Congress leaped to renew it. The results have been deadly: As the Brady Campaign's Paul Helmke points out: "One thing the Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University shooters had in common was that they both used high capacity ammunition magazines that would have been prohibited under the Federal Assault Weapons Ban that expired in 2004."

Of course, easing up on gun control has been critical to the Dems courting voters in Western and Southwestern swing states; the more Democratic candidates have traded gun bans for wishy-washy pro-regulation positions, the more the NRA has rewarded them, upping their political contributions to the Dems. ''Certainly, we support more Republicans than Democrats," a public affairs director told the Boston Globe in 2005, "but we've seen in the last few years an increasing number of Democrats actively seeking the NRA endorsement and actually winning it."

As Salon reported following the Virginia Tech massacre last spring:

Today, a substantial portion of the party's new standard-bearers are pro-gun, or at least anti-gun control. Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor who now heads the Democratic National Committee and is the favorite of the new party power base emerging from the Internet, has long been an opponent of gun control. So has Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., the man whose squeaker victory in November gave Democrats control of the Senate and who was selected to give the party's response to President Bush's State of the Union address this year. Last month, one of Webb's aides was arrested on his way in to a Senate building with one of Webb's guns in his possession. Webb responded with a spirited defense of his right and need to bear arms. Even Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the new Senate majority leader, is pro-gun.

So where do Clinton and Obama fall on gun control?

It's hard to say, they've said so little about it. As a Boston Globe editorial by Derrick K. Jackson pointed out this week:

Clinton has nothing about gun control on her website. The only reference to guns on Obama's is his plan for sportsmen, which includes "Protecting Gun Rights." That section says, "As a former constitutional law professor, Barack Obama understands and believes in the constitutional right of Americans to bear arms. He will protect the rights of hunters and other law-abiding Americans to purchase, own, transport, and use guns for the purposes of hunting and target shooting."

Not too promising.

Nor is it particularly surprising, given the Dems' deliberate shift in their gun control stance. But as candidates who promise "change" and "solutions," it's still disappointing. The Democrats may be playing it politically safe by keeping silent -- or pandering to the right -- on this life-or-death issue. But tell that to the families who are routinely affected by gun violence, whether in freak campus shootings or on city streets.

"As Clinton talks realism and Obama talks common sense," Jackson writes, "the senseless killings continue, aided tremendously by the American access to guns."

At the very least, it's an issue that's ripe for debate.

Liliana Segura is an AlterNet staff writer and Editor of the Rights & Liberties section.