The Coming Cultural Shift On Guns, Take 45

The headline on the Daily Beast in the wake of the shootings at a community college in Roseburg, Ore., didn't exactly come as a surprise. "The New Crusade for Gun Control: The Brady Campaign hopes we're about to see a cultural shift in the debate over guns —and has a plan to capitalize on that change."

What is somewhat surprising is that the press falls for this claim over and over again.

After every gun tragedy, gun control advocates talk about how this latest one is the one that will change American minds about the prevalence of guns in the U.S. And every time, journalists write about it as though it were a real prospect.

But then, sure enough, gun sales go up after each shooting, and nothing, or next to nothing, gets achieved.

After the December 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., the press ran numerous stories about how the scale and horror of that tragedy opened the door to serious gun control laws.

The New York Times, for example, concluded that the massacre "appears to be profoundly swaying Americans' views on guns, galvanizing the broadest support for stricter gun laws in about a decade, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll."

After spending zero time on gun control during his reelection bid, President Obama made it a top priority of his second term.

But a year after, a Pew Research Center survey found that attitudes were little changed from before the Newton killings. Obama's plans had fizzled.

Read the rest of this John Merline op-ed HERE.

If you like what you see, please "Like" us on Facebook either here or here. Please follow us on Twitter here.