Politics, current affairs and riffs and reflections on the news.
The defeat of President Obama’s gun-control package last week
undoubtedly represents the most dramatic disappointment in the
entire history of the movement to restrict firearms abuse in the
United States. Many observers sadly noted that it might take
another tragedy on the scale of December’s massacre at Sandy
Hook Elementary to secure enough votes for a serious reform
measure. It is interesting, though, and perhaps even
instructive, to recall just how brief is the history of gun
control advocacy. Rather than critique the outsized role guns
play in American culture and society, as many Nation articles do
now, our earliest pieces on the subject discussed firearms much
as one would talk about books or paintings: public discussion of
guns was seemingly limited to comparison, criticism, and review.
The Nation doesn’t appear to have even noticed the first modern
gun control legislation, the National Firearms Act of 1934,
which imposed heavy taxes and