The US gun lobby’s strength is not money, but voting power

Gun politics in the US demonstrates that a popular majority does not always get its way. Even though most Americans support stricter gun safety laws, proposals for important new regulations reliably face impassable obstacles in Congress.

The standard explanation for this impasse is that the minority is mobilised and well-funded. This is only half right: the power of gun control opponents stems more from their shared sense of identity than from their money.

Frustrated liberals are well aware of the difficulties they face in winning a major legislative battle over gun policy, but they often misunderstand the source of the obstruction. As in other policy areas, such as health care or environmental regulation, many Democrats are predisposed to view Republican opposition as primarily reflecting the supposedly undue influence of wealthy or corporate interests.

After the recent mass shooting at a Nashville school, former House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said that Congress’s refusal to renew the 1994 federal ban on assault weapons is “all about money ... big money in the gun business”. Democratic leaders habitually accuse the National Rifle Association (NRA) of buying the votes of Republican politicians via direct financial contributions and independent campaign expenditures.

But while the NRA is a famously powerful interest group, most of its influence does not derive from the money it spends on elections. As the political scientist Matthew Lacombe explains in his 2021 book Firepower, the NRA’s most transformational achievement was not financial but cultural: it successfully defined gun ownership as a distinctive form of social identity.

For decades, Lacombe writes, the NRA has encouraged gun owners to see themselves as “reputable, honest, patriotic citizens who are self-sufficient and love freedom”, but who constantly face unmerited attacks from “politicians, the media and lawyers”. He concludes that gun control supporters are at a relative disadvantage because they lack a countervailing identity of their own.

In polls, a majority of Americans mildly favour the additional regulation of firearms. But few consider not owning a gun as a central element of their personal lifestyle that they will mobilise to defend.

Over the past decade or so, gun safety advocates have founded several new organisations and engaged in increasingly visible forms of public protest. Much of this activism has openly invoked infamous events such as the Sandy Hook and Parkland school shootings, or has been led by victims of gun violence such as former US representative Gabby Giffords of Arizona. The creation of this institutional infrastructure is a logical attempt to build a counterpart to the NRA and other gun rights groups, with the goal of convincing elected officials that popular passions are not limited to one side of the gun debate.

But gun safety advocates are unlikely to extend their influence to the other side of the aisle. Gun owners and their family members are an important constituency within the conservative activist community and the Republican primary electorate. Republican officeholders are careful not to alienate gun rights organisations because they are worried about losing votes, not just political action committee money.

So the partisan gridlock over gun policy is less likely to be broken by specific political tactics than by a larger shift in the cultural zeitgeist. If gun ownership loses popular appeal as a salient personal identity — because it becomes socially discouraged or simply goes out of style — one of the major impediments to a leftward policy change will become less formidable.

Staunch opponents of gun control may be outnumbered in the US, but they still wield considerable power. Not only have they prevented Congress from passing major gun safety regulation, they have also succeeded in getting many Republican-controlled states to make it easier for citizens to purchase and carry guns. That is because in politics, it does not just matter what you say — it also matters how much you care.

Bloomberg