Analysis: Why the President, Congress and the Supreme Court can’t — or won’t — stop mass shootings

We know that gun violence can happen anywhere because it has happened everywhere. Schools, churches, supermarkets, ball fields, Walmarts. Gun violence targets young children, Black people, Asian Americans, random citizens and politicians from both parties.

More US kids 17 and under died from gun violence in 2021 than have died from Covid-19 during the pandemic:

Powerless President

Paralyzed Senate

After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, a majority of senators agreed to a bipartisan bill to expand background checks to all gun purchases except those between family members. It failed because a bipartisan minority opposed the bill.

Notably, the three Democrats who opposed that 2013 bill have all been replaced by Republicans in the Senate. Another Democrat opposed the bill for procedural reasons.

Three Republicans supported the bill and two of the seats they represented are up for grabs in tightly contested elections this fall.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had no answers for how to move gun legislation other than to encourage people to vote in November in the midterm elections. But no likely election outcome will give either party the 60 votes needed to pass meaningful legislation.

Partisanship is growing

Democrats, who narrowly control the Senate today, have moved toward a vote on a background check bill, but it is doomed to fail without those 60 votes.

Any compromise seems a long way from becoming reality. And it’s not clear those bills would have kept guns from most of the people who carry out these horrible crimes.

North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis said he worries red flag laws would also take guns from people who don’t need them taken away.

“Virtually every one that I’ve seen here has been one that sweep up law-abiding gun owners into what I consider to be an overreach,” Tillis told CNN on Tuesday.

Many states keep loosening laws. Other states’ laws don’t work

Courts strike down laws

Most restrictions on guns are enforced at the state level, and there is a patchwork of laws across the country. Even in states where strong majorities support gun control measures, federal courts have stood in the way.

The country is clearly split on the issue of guns and how to restrict them. There is an apocryphal belief among many Americans that the Constitution views gun ownership in the same way it views life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. An increasingly conservative Supreme Court has turned that belief into precedent.

You’ve certainly read that large majorities of the country support certain gun restrictions — and that is true.

Support for gun restrictions rises and falls

But it is not a vast majority of the country that wants a wholesale rewriting of the nation’s gun laws.

CNN’s director of polling Jennifer Agiesta notes that “support for stricter gun laws tends to spike after high-profile mass shootings, such as the one at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, which occurred a few weeks before Gallup measured its recent high of 67{3b930a6ca12a59604e1bbadfc55b7d1b7a0aa8613f1ab9377cace0d5afcb5fb9} support for stricter laws in March 2018.”

All that could change after this new, horrible string of shootings.

People do support specific things

Smaller but sill substantial majorities supported more controversial ideas, according to the Pew analysis:

Despite the Supreme Court’s skepticism of New York’s permit law, just 20{3b930a6ca12a59604e1bbadfc55b7d1b7a0aa8613f1ab9377cace0d5afcb5fb9} in Pew’s polling, including only 35{3b930a6ca12a59604e1bbadfc55b7d1b7a0aa8613f1ab9377cace0d5afcb5fb9} of gun owners nationwide, favored a law “allowing people to carry concealed guns without a permit.”