Mitch McConnell Lost His “Gun Control Law” Gambit

I wrote in detail at the time that in allowing the bipartisan gun control bill to pass the Senate, McConnell was playing pure politics. He and the other GOP Senators voted Yea Because they could. Most GOP Senators who voted in favor were either retiring, or not on the ballot for at least 1 more cycle.

McConnell’s calculation was simple. Mass shootings made it untenable for the GOP to continue to resist. Using John Cornyn, he diluted the bill as much as possible, concentrating resources on red flag laws and mental health initiatives. He gave what he had to by letting the Democrats close off the Boyfriend Loophole. His calculus was that by passing major gun reform 3 months from election day, that took that issue off of the table for the Democrats.

McConnell was even more honest in an interview he gave yesterday. He said that While the GOP has a solid lock on the rural districts and communities, they have lost support in the more moderate suburban neighborhoods. Passing legislation that was important to them would hopefully bring them back home for November.

Swing and a miss. I know Highland Park, I’ve been to festivals there in my younger days. It’s about 30 minutes north of Chicago, and is exactly the kind of place that McConnell was talking about yesterday. It is largely residential, mostly white, with a healthy Jewish population, and a median average annual income of $155,000 a year. These are exactly the kind of white suburban voters that McConnell was trying to woo back by getting Gun Control off of the table for November.

No chance. We’re not talking about an African American neighborhood of Buffalo, nor are we talking about a small, mostly Hispanic town in Texas. This is an upper middle class, mostly white suburb of a major city. And If it can happen there, it can happen anywhere. Including other upper middle class, mostly white suburbs across the nation.

This won’t go away anytime soon. New polling today showed that 70% of Americans want more restrictive gun laws right now. One guest put it perfectly on MSNBC today when he said that the entire country is suffering from PTSD. The mass shootings are coming too fast and furious, and from too many disparate places for people to process. They just want it to stop.

Pundits and experts on the networks are asking the questions every American is asking. If you can’t go to church without getting shot, where can you go? If you can’t go to a grocery store for a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk without getting shot, where can you go? If you can’t take your kids to school in the morning without an assurance that they’ll walk out in the afternoon, where can you go? If you can’t take your kids to a fucking Parade, where can you go?

Now, look at this from the eyes of one of those precious white suburban soccer moms McConnell is so desperate to attract, who took their kids to the Highland Park parade. If they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, their toddlers and school age children saw people shot through the head, people with gaping holes in their chests and stomachs, people with limbs blown off. It will take years of therapy for their children to deal with this, and they’ll still never be quite the same.

Last night, after the Highland Park shooting, and uncovered by the tragedy, 10 people were shot, with 3 killed in Gary Indiana. Gary is a mostly African American, lower class town just over the border from Illinois. But it took a mass shooting in Highland Park to finally shake the complacency off of upper middle class white America. It can literally happen anywhere.

The Aurora theater, Parkland, San Bernardino, Pulse nightclub, Sandy Hook, the Silver Springs church in Texas, Mother Emanuel AME church, Parkland, the Las Vegas Route 66 music festival. They all have 1 thing in common. The shooters used assault weapons that were banned from 1994-2004, when mawss shootings declined.

If I’m Nancy Pelosi, the first thing I do when the House comes back from the break, I ram through a brand new assault weapons ban. And I let the GOP put their names down against it. And Chuck Schumer must immediately bring it to the floor for a vote, and let the GOP stand united against it.

Because this is what the American people want. And while they’re in control, the Democrats have to go for it, even if it means calling a motion to the floor to carve out an exception to the filibuster for gun reform legislation, and let Manchin and Sinema piss away their careers voting it down. If the Democrats want to run on this, they have to come down on the side of the angels.

Because sadly, Highland Park won’t be the last one. There are still 4 months to election day. The only question isn’t if, it’s when and where. And when it happens, McConnell and the GOP are going to have to paddlefoot away from it again. And the more the Democrats have them locked in, the better. Abortion and gun control are shaping up to be the two dominant issues in the midterms, and the Democrats own both of them. Just don’t screw it up.