The One Group That Could Make a Difference on Gun Control

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

64% : "They also institutionalized relationships between police and the NRA that could better weather the dicey moments when gun rights appeared to endanger police."
61% : A young white man who brings an assault weapon to a protest becomes a poster child for gun rights, while a Black man with a lawful firearm who gets killed by police is just collateral damage.
61% : Derek Thompson: The overlooked role of guns in the police-reform debate These dynamics, in fact, reinforce each other -- the easy availability of firearms in the United States serves as justification both for police misconduct and for private gun ownership.
60% : America's tradition of firearm ownership is not an invention of the NRA, but the idea that all gun restrictions are unconstitutional would have been entirely foreign to the authors of the Second Amendment.
55% : The police, who have traditionally been conservative and strongly supported gun rights, are not exempt from partisan polarization or evolutions in conservative political identity.
54% : Notwithstanding the exact phrasing of the Second Amendment, the provision has never been popularly construed as a right explicitly tied to militia service, nor was it seen at the time of its establishment as banning all regulation of firearms.
53% : That understanding and that interpretation took hold, and a lot of people started to believe it, including people who are members of law enforcement," Kelly Sampson, the director of justice and senior counsel at the gun-control advocacy organization Brady, told me.
53% : The Democratic president enthusiastically supported the tough-on-crime agenda in the '90s, and wants to increase federal funding and support for law enforcement, but given the ideological composition of their membership, it's hard for such organizations to contemplate cooperating with the likes of Joe Biden on even minor restrictions on firearms.
51% : "This idea that the Second Amendment is an über-right -- that it's a bulwark against tyranny, the last stop between citizens and being under the boot of government -- that was an idea that the gun-rights advocates really started to push significantly in the '90s.
51% : But it was an anomalous moment -- and as long as American law enforcement remains so clearly aligned with one political party, such conditions are unlikely to recur.
50% : When the assault-weapon ban expired in 2004, the gun industry began an advertising campaign cultivating a particular consumer identity that now dominates the politics of gun policy.
50% : "Rank-and-file police officers now are Republicans who support gun rights and who are skeptical of gun control, and that's pretty much it ...
49% : Those restrictions also point to the historical consistency of American law enforcement's support for gun rights.
49% : "The organization doubled down on 'tough on crime' rhetoric and subtly reminded cops that gun control was supported by liberals -- and liberals were notoriously soft on crime," Carlson writes.
47% : "I really do think it's just the politics of rank-and-file police officers -- fundamentally, they don't support gun control; they really believe that guns are a right, and an armed citizenry is a safer one," Michael Zoorob, a researcher who has studied the politics of police organizations, told me.
44% : American police, like other institutions, have been affected by the partisan polarization of recent decades, resulting in an already conservative demographic identifying even more strongly with the Republican Party and its opposition to gun control laws.
42% : Most gun deaths -- half of which are suicides -- and gun crimes involve handguns, but the AR-15's prominence has as much to do with the identity politics of the weapon as with its association with mass shootings, which have increased markedly since the lapse of the assault-weapons ban.
40% : "They see gun control in terms of this war that police see themselves fighting in urban streets."
40% : The rhetoric employed by police advocates in favor of gun control was not what you might describe as progressive, and Gates was no left-wing hero -- he ran an LAPD where racism and brutality were casually accepted without consequence.
40% : Back then, the fear of being overmatched in the street spurred enough support from law enforcement for gun restrictions to pass.
38% : "The assault-weapons ban, it really wasn't supported from the perspective of this is gun control, but rather this is another tool on the war on crime," Jennifer Carlson, the author of Policing the Second Amendment, told me.
38% : "That changed the whole conversation around firearms in general, so that now it's become this extreme understanding that you cannot have any sort of gun laws whatsoever."
37% : The gun-rights movement, traditionally allied with police, had begun to employ rhetoric that portrayed federal law enforcement as oppressive.
37% : While urging Congress to adopt restrictions on assault weapons, Gates clarified that he was not a "gun-control advocate" and did not "believe in general gun control."
36% : But one of the most significant factors preventing gun control on the federal level might be that American police themselves are broadly opposed to restrictions on guns, and they remain one of the only institutions in American life whose influence on conservative voters is significant enough to make any federal gun regulations feasible.
35% : And groups like the NRA worked to repair the breach with law enforcement.
18% : Read: The real reason America doesn't have gun control Democratic backing for law enforcement has done little to erode the association among police officers of liberals with the Black Lives Matter movement, and the accompanying perception that Democrats are their enemies and Republicans are their allies.

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