How Democrats Learned to Stop Playing Scared on Guns

This post originally appeared on The Trace.

When then-Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was caught on tape musing about "bitter" Americans who "cling to guns or religion" in 2008, his opponent, Hillary Clinton, seized the episode as an opportunity to make a comeback. Appealing to rural Democrats, she talked up her own enjoyment of shooting with her dad and rescinded her previous calls for a national gun registry. After she failed to turn guns into a wedge issue, though, top Democrats had little interest in discussing gun policy, beyond loosening a few niche gun restrictions.

Just as Obama was sewing up the Democratic nomination, the Supreme Court was preparing to deliver gun reformers a stinging blow with its historic Heller v. District of Columbia in which the justices upended centuries of precedent and declared that the US Constitution does indeed guarantee the individual right to bear arms. The decision demoralized gun control advocates already sidelined by their putative political allies.

Eight years later, cheering a House occupation broadcast on Facebook Live, sustained by pizza delivered by new pro-gun reform groups, and fired up by a voter calculus that has Democrats believing they can win on the gun issue, the party has taken on the issue with a gusto that would have been unimaginable at the start of Obama's presidency. The future of the bills Democrats are pushing in Washington is unclear, but this much seems certain: Whatever happens on Capitol Hill, a huge test has been set for November.

Here are the key moments that got the party where it is now on guns.

February 2009: Rahm Emanuel Aggressively Tells Obama Cabinet Members to Leave the Gun Issue Alone

During the second month of Obama's presidency, Emanuel, then serving as the White House chief of staff, sent an urgent message to US Attorney General Eric Holder: "Shut the fuck up" on guns. Holder had recently told the press that the Obama administration supported the reinstatement of an assault weapons ban, which had expired in 2004. Holder's statement angered the Blue Dog Democrats that Emanuel needed to pass the president's ambitious domestic agenda, including an overhaul of the healthcare system.

July 2009: For the First Time, the National Rifle Association Opts to Rate a Supreme Court Nominee's Record on Guns

When Obama got his first chance to nominate someone to the Supreme Court, the NRA broke with precedent to assert its influence over a branch of government putatively independent from partisan politics: the judiciary. Sonia Sotomayor was expected to swiftly replace retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter when Obama put her name forward for the seat. As a federal judge, Sotomayor had never explicitly engaged with gun rights: The closest she came was a decision upholding New York state's ban on nunchucks, in which she said the Second Amendment does not prevent states from regulating deadly weapons.

But the confirmation hearings took place at the start of the Obama presidency, and Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell needed to shore up his caucus to thwart the White House's agenda. So he asked the NRA to score the vote on Sotomayor. The organization, unsurprisingly, announced it opposed her nomination, citing the nunchuck ruling.

From then on, the NRA remained involved in federal judicial appointments. To Republican senators, the message was clear: Support a Democratic judicial appointee, and there will be consequences. In 2012, when then-Republican Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, who voted to confirm Sotomayor, was up for reelection, the NRA ran an ad campaign reminding voters that he sent a gun-grabber to the high court. Lugar, who had served in the Senate for over 35 years, lost his primary race to a Tea Party candidate named Richard Mourdock.

September 2009: Democrats Pass Laws Allowing Guns on Amtrak and in National Parks

In his first year in office, when Democrats held a majority in both chambers of Congress, President Obama signed into law two bills expanding gun rights. The first allowed licensed gun owners to carry concealed, loaded weapons into national parks and wildlife refuges. The second, part of an omnibus spending bill, allowed travelers on Amtrak trains to store unloaded, locked guns in their checked baggage. Both measures passed Congress with wide Democratic support.

November 2010: The NRA Gives Money to Democrats for the Last Time

The 2010 midterm election cycle was the last in which the NRA broadly supported Democrats who maintained strong pro-gun voting records. All told, the group spent nearly half a million dollars backing dozens of Democrats, 65 of them in the House of Representatives alone.

But 2010 also saw the rise of the Tea Party, and when insurgent conservative candidates swept Republicans back into control of the House, the NRA found itself at risk of falling behind the rightwing tide. By 2014, the NRA's support for Democratic candidates had all but disappeared.

December 2012: A Gunman Kills 26 People—Most of Them First Graders —at Sandy Hook Elementary School

The mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, capped a series of high-profile shootings that brought gun violence back into the national consciousness in a big way. In June 2011, Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords had been shot in the head outside a Safeway grocery store in her home state of Arizona. (Since her recovery, Giffords has become a staunch advocate for gun control, and founded the gun violence prevention group Americans for Responsible Solutions.) One year later, a shooter opened fire in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, killing 12.

The mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School followed just six months later. Reactions to the slaying of 20 schoolchildren and six educators pushed gun rights advocates and gun reform advocates further apart. On one end, the head of the NRA, Wayne LaPierre, decried gun-free zones and called for armed security in all American schools. On the other, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America emerged to pressure Democrats into making gun control a real issue for progressives.

April 2014: A Bipartisan Proposal to Expand Background Checks Fails in the Senate

Five months after the Sandy Hook shooting, Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Republican Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania introduced an amendment that would have expanded background checks to cover firearms purchases at gun shows and on the internet. The measure required 60 votes to proceed, which meant sponsors needed support from all 55 members of the Democratic caucus, and also at least five Republicans.

Manchin and Toomey made a number of concessions to entice red state Democrats and Republicans to support the proposal, including one that would allow licensed firearms dealers to sell handguns across state lines. Their proposal fell short, with only 54 votes. Four Democrats—Arkansas's Mark Pryor, North Dakota's Heidi Heitkamp, Alaska's Mark Begich, and Montana's Max Baucus—opposed it on behalf of their conservative constituents (Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who supported the bill, also voted against it for procedural reasons.) Meanwhile, just three Republican senators, in addition to Toomey, voted in favor: Mark Kirk of Illinois, John McCain of Arizona, and Susan Collins of Maine.

November 2013: Democrats Take on the NRA in Virginia and Still Win State Elections

Virginia's Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe ignored conventional wisdom in his gun-friendly state, celebrating his F rating from the NRA and positioning himself as a full-throated supporter of gun control measures. His stance was a vivid contrast with that of his opponent, the state's arch-conservative attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli. And at the end of the day, McAuliffe won. Democrat Mark Herring was also victorious, succeeding Cuccinelli in the attorney general's office after highlighting his support for gun-safety legislation during the election.

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