The Party has always had the opportunity to drop this issue. The party just can't let it go, hoping that THIS TIME, there is a majority of voters supporting gun control; that THIS TIME, the issue won't cost votes; that THIS TIME, the party's majority is so strong that we will win despite any so-called blue-dog objection to gun control.

Trump's backers actually believed they could win; that they could hammer the Democrats as well as their own "establishmemt" party.

And they did.

Resurgent lefty Demos face the same prospects, only they aren't willing to sky dive for the first time. Lots of anger, lots of cock-strutting, lots of moral indignation, but in the end that warm bed of bidness as usual was and is too alluring for them to make the changes necessary. And the first step is to go after the Party's creaky, jargon-jiving elite. The Tea-Party and the Trumpers did the same to the GOP.

30k+ deaths

2/3rds suicide

out of the 1/3 left, I *think* 60%+ is gang related.

Gun control is a losing proposition; it's in the constitution and rural voters like their guns. Some city people do as well, but rural voters don't want restrictions and to be fair, they aren't the ones with the problems.

...out of the 1/3 left, I *think* 60%+ is gang related.....

Well, not necessarily gang related, but it's estimated that 2/3 of the remaining 1/3 is criminal on criminal. Obviously, much of that is gang/drug related. So shelving our hugely unsuccessful "War on Drugs" would go a long way to reducing gun deaths.
(Which are HALF of what they were in 1993)

Michael Moore's sad prediction on the outcome of the recent election should give Democrats pause to reflect on the gun issue. I fear that we'll just double-down on stoopid, however. Even Trump is quoted as being anti "assault weapon". His base will likely explain to him the silliness of "assault weapon" bans pretty quickly.

Given the fact that the GOP was praying to run against Hillary, and praying that she'd talk about "gun control", it's entirely possible that the gun issue spelled the difference in the outcome of the election. Those who think that folks in the Midwest didn't take note of what is going down in CA and MA are smoking some powerful stuff!

Dems and the Gun Issue - Now What? (2004)

That's a crosspost to DU from January 2005 that I wrote in late 2004, after Kerry got clobbered in several key swing states on the gun issue, just like Gore in '00, and a lot of JK supporters couldn't understand why his talking up hunting and "huntin' guns" didn't defuse it. Some minor details of the landscape have shifted in the last 12 years, but the key points still stand, I think.

I was going to crosspost it here again, but I think I'll start a new thread to avoid derailing this one too badly.

I think the GunIssue© is a microcosm of what the Democratic Party must go through as a whole so that it can appeal to far more people than its present coastal base. In other words, the change to a more liberal progressive outlook will be fought tooth & nail by Beltway Democrats. To paraphrase Freud in his reference to syphilis: Those who know how to reconcile the Democratic Party's gun issue knows how to change the Party.

(He who knows syphilis knows medicine.)