You're losing your clout:
The vaunted National Rifle Association and the rest of the gun lobby -- for years presumed deadly to any politician who dared to buck them -- were firing blanks in the recent election.
Lobby-promoted candidates generally fared poorly. Candidates who support firearms controls that most people consider sensible were not routed, not even where typically hysterical campaigns were run against them.
At least for this election cycle, the single-issue, guns-are-everything voter -- the source of the lobby's political intimidation -- turned out to be more pussycat than tiger.
Might the way finally lie clear for the political system to engage pragmatically with the nation's reckless trafficking in firearms and the violence with which, partly as a consequence, Americans have had to put up with as no other people must do?
The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence has parsed the election results. The NRA conducted major television ad campaigns against Barack Obama in 13 key states, including several with histories of falling for the lobby's tactics. Obama carried 11 of those states.
And in the 25 congressional elections in which the Democrats gained seats, the NRA had backed 20 of the losers.
The Brady Campaign's president said, "We know of no candidates at any level, in any race, who lost because they supported sensible guns laws."
You don't have to take the gun-control organization's word for it. Gun Owners of America, though in its usual overwrought language, agrees: "The new Congress has moved decidedly in an anti-gun direction and many pro-gun leaders were defeated."
("Anti-gun," you understand, meaning, for instance, barring concealed firearms from airports.)
The gunners' answer to gun violence is public shoot-outs.
Their lobby fights even the most obvious common sense controls in favor of pushing for enabling legislation that would encourage people to carry more firearms in more public places.
Yet polling has found for some time that majorities -- often including most gun owners -- support a five-day waiting period for handgun purchases, limits on the number of firearms that can be bought at any one time, outlawing assault-style weapons, closing the loophole that lets buyers at gun shows duck background checks.
One election does not make a trend, but it can be fairly suspected -- and certainly hoped -- that in this election we may have seen the first welcome if unintended fruit from the Supreme Court's ruling this year that the Second Amendment asserts a personal right to gun ownership.
Historically, the courts had read the amendment as a community right pegged to the maintenance of state militias. Most control advocates hated the court's about-face, but the ruling equally made it clear that familiar controls -- and thus presumably, by extension, comparably sensible ones -- are not barred.
The reinterpretation has robbed the NRA et al. of the slippery-slope argument that they have used to malign effect for years in a state of near-constant frenzy -- the nutty claim that any gun control would soon lead to federal goons kicking in your door and grabbing your guns. And Hitler coming in right after them. (And you thought he was dead!)
Maybe, just maybe, even the ever-gulled are catching on that with private ownership nailed down, we can talk like adults about how to manage that right with good sense.
Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers based in Atlanta;
teepencolumn@earthlink.net.
