Of course, gun-control laws are mostly bad. And mostly unconstitutional.
Disclosure: the authors are my legal counsel in the Mann lawsuit.
[Update a few minutes later]
Why Obama is losing on guns:
…Democrats could have threatened to primary these Democrats or withhold campaign funds, but that’s not very realistic in states in which these moderates may barely hang on in an election in which the Democrats could lose their majority. The White House can try to ply them with pork, although that’s a lot harder to do these days since it isn’t clear there will even be a budget. And the president’s not very popular in many states, so an offer to campaign with and for these Democrats isn’t very enticing. For now it seems the Democrats may try to water down the Toomey-Manchin amendment and try to wean away a few red-state Democrats. It is a sort of legislative limbo in which the bar gets lower and lower, but in this case it’s not clear the red-state Democrats want to play the game at all.
It is a misnomer, then, to blame the “gun lobby” for the difficulty in passing legislation. The red-state Democrats, like most of their Republican colleagues, are reflecting their own constituents’ views. If you polled specifically in the states where these Democrats come from, I bet you’d find gun regulation and bans a whole lot less popular than the nation at large. (I imagine some of them are in fact polling.) If the president were more popular in red states or more able to induce enthusiasm, then that might have made a difference.
And it is still possible that the needle can be threaded. Unfortunately for the president, whatever passes will bear scant resemblance to his desired legislation.
Of course, he’s losing on guns for the same reason that he loses on many things — his agenda is not that of the public. They continue to want real jobs, and he continues to ignore their wants.