The signs are all over the place, including the comments here at Delaware Liberal: The jig is up. The fields of public discourse have been spread with all the bullshit they will hold.
Whenever the right-wingers get nervous they take it out on liberal blogs, the same way an ape feeling his position threatened will put on a branch-smashing, chest-thumping violence display for onlookers. But the pro-gun visitors we got today weren’t repeating their usual crap — they wanted to talk things out in a mature and sensible manner. Some give and take, a meeting of the minds.
As I said in the comments, you don’t negotiate when you’re winning, and you don’t win by negotiating. You negotiate when you’re losing. Especially these people.
Until now, the gun lobby has relied on brute force to carry the day in politics. The NRA offers no compromise on any issue, and it hasn’t had to because it assembled a single-issue-voting army to go with unlimited arms-manufacturer money. It saw how the forced-birth movement made itself a national political force and followed the lessons well, maintaining its fearsome reputation even as its power shows signs of waning.
There’s a strong possibility that all ended a week ago today when a clearly disturbed young man shot up his old high school, killing 17 people and wounding a dozen others. Many more than that saw horrible things and survived to tell about them, and they have started a movement that has to chill these already fearful people to the bone.
Here’s another sign amid the goat entrails: The paranoid fringe — which apparently includes Republican elected officials — already has resorted to the “crisis actors” meme, normally the refuge of last resort for cognitive dissonance. I expect any minute now Team Red will start blaming the media for exploiting all those teenagers who lost teachers and classmates for ratings, since calling them paid actors didn’t work. They will say anything to drown out the sound of those kids bearing witness to what they saw.
That’s why this one is different. By pulling the fire alarm and getting people into the hallways, the shooter ensured lots of people would see the results. The majority lived to talk about it. It’s riveting stuff, and Republicans are desperate to keep people from watching.
Donald Trump offered the first concession by moving to ban bump stocks, a minuscule gesture that manages to offend by addressing the last massacre instead of the current one. Oh, and tweeting tweeting his support for background checks, which clocked in with 97% public support this morning in the Quinnipiac poll. (Don’t know about you, but I’m encouraged he still realizes 97 is greater than 3). Golly, if only he hadn’t cut funding for background checks just last week. And I won’t even bring up where he was on the issue of the mentally ill having access to guns just one year ago. Those grave sins against the 2nd Amendment already have triggered (heh) a revolt by House conservatives. It’s clear that only the most modest nibbling at the margins will be allowed, turning the midterms into a referendum on the NRA.
There is one possible way gun-hugging Republicans can avoid an Election Day of reckoning: Public opinion on gun issues is remarkably swingy, much more so than on other hot-button issues, and support for gun control tends to die down in the lulls between massacres. Election Day is less than 10 months away. All America has to do is avoid another mass shooting for 10 months and Americans will forget all about what happened back in February.
Let’s see if America’s high school students will let them.