” The latest New York Times/CBS News poll finds that about nine out of 10 Americans continue to favor “a federal law requiring background checks on all potential gun buyers.” But as President Obama has suggested, a lot of these people seem to think we already have such a law, because only 54 percent of respondents said they supported stricter gun control.
And despite the fact that Obama has been pushing a requirement that 88 percent of Americans say they support, only 41 percent approve of the way he has been handling gun policy, while 52 percent disapprove. That’s twice as high as the percentage who said they had an unfavorable view of the National Rifle Association, which Obama has sought to demonize at every opportunity.
Furthermore, even though Republicans in Congress opposed expanded background checks, more Americans trust them to “make the right decisions about gun laws” than trust the president (44 percent vs. 41 percent). A Republican respondent interviewed by the Times after the survey suggested a possible explanation for this apparent inconsistency. ”I was really ticked off that the law didn’t pass,” he said, “but I thought it was wrong of President Obama to get in front of the public and use people who had been damaged by gun violence as props.”
Obama’s difficulty in winning the trust of gun control skeptics, even when they agree with him on the issue at hand, goes beyond his crass and insulting rhetoric. Although he frequently proclaims his support for Second Amendment rights, he has a very narrow concept of what they entail. He tellingly defended the constitutionality of the severe gun restrictions overturned by the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago, which barred law-abiding citizens from keeping handguns for self-protection even in their own homes. Obama argues that state and municipal governments have wide latitude under the Second Amendment to adopt gun controls that make sense in light of local conditions, even when those laws virtually eliminate the right to keep and bear arms. The D.C. law overturned in Heller, for instance, not only banned handguns but also effectively forbade the use of rifles or shotguns for self-defense. As Obama put it after Heller was decided in 2010, “What works in Chicago may not work in Cheyenne.” And vice versa, of course. In light of that position, Obama’s anecdote about how his wife came to empathize with rural gun owners is not as reassuring as it may seem on its face:
And so one of the questions we talked about was, how do you build trust? How do you rebuild some trust? And I told the story about two conversations I had. The first conversation was when Michelle came back from doing some campaigning out in rural Iowa. And we were sitting at dinner, and she had been to like a big county, a lot of driving out there, a lot of farmland. And she said, if I was living out in a farm in Iowa, I’d probably want a gun, too. If somebody just drives up into your driveway and you’re not home—you don’t know who these people are and you don’t know how long it’s going to take for the sheriffs to respond. I can see why you’d want some guns for protection. That’s one conversation.”
Illustration by Dana Summers
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