I don’t have the expertise on guns and violence that some of my Bloomberg Opinion colleagues or many academic experts have. So I really don’t know which of the gun-control policies Democrats have proposed would be helpful, which would make little difference and which would create new risks.
What I do know is that that Democrats are a normal U.S. political party, which means that they are mainly pragmatic problem-solvers. That is, what U.S. political parties are usually good at is finding out what makes their constituents unhappy and attempting to do something about it. They listen to voters in their districts; to the party coalition that nominates them; to their strongest supporters. Some of their solutions may turn out to be highly ideological. Some are not. They’re generally willing to cut deals to pass something, figuring that something is better than nothing. If it doesn’t have the votes, or it’s implemented and it doesn’t work, they’ll try something else.
The Democrats have been like that for well over a century. The Republicans used to be like that, too. The instinctive approaches the two parties took differed, in part because of ideology, in part because different groups made up different coalitions and in part because parties wind up with legacy policies that they support because they’ve always supported them.
