By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
MSN.com is reporting that Democrat strategists are worried Joe Biden’s current gun control push could make the party “vulnerable” during the 2022 mid-term elections.
It would not be the first time an administration’s gun control policies resulted in voter backlash. Twenty-seven years ago, Democrats lost dozens of seats largely on the gun control issue.
Biden has launched a radical gun control agenda and gun rights organizations are fighting back. According to the MSN story, “One North Carolina-based Democratic strategist said voting on an assault weapons ban would help fuel Republican arguments that the Biden administration is coming to take their guns.”
It may not be a matter of “taking” guns, just making them illegal with the stroke of a pen that worries gun owners.
What apparently worries Democrats is a repeat of the 1994 mid-term elections that saw both houses of Congress flip to Republican control, thus putting the brakes on the Bill Clinton administration for the remainder of his presidency.
As noted by MSN, “The president’s latest push goes beyond expanded background checks and sets the stage for votes to ban assault-style weapons and high-capacity magazines – a potential political liability in Senate battlegrounds such as Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.”
Virginia’s legislative elections this fall might provide a signal. In 2019, only about 40 percent of Virginia voters bothered to cast a ballot. As a result, Democrats took over in Richmond and helped ram through a gun control agenda that included one-handgun-a-month and so-called “universal background checks.”
Virginia gun owners jammed public meetings, and in January 2020 more than 20,000 activists gathered in Richmond to show their opposition to new gun restrictions. When Democrats essentially ignored them, activists started planning a strong get-out-the-vote effort this year. November will show whether they are successful.
What set the stage in 1994 was passage of the Brady Handgun Law in 1993 and the Clinton Crime Bill in 1994 that included a 10-year ban on so-called “assault weapons” and full capacity magazines. That was the year Democrat House Speaker Tom Foley was among the election casualties, because his congressional district was far Eastern Washington, the conservative section of the Evergreen State where gun ownership is high.
Combined with then-Congressman Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America,” Republicans were able to sweep more than 50 Democrats from Capitol Hill in a devastating rejection of taxes, gun control and other Democrat issues.
