Gun Owners Can't Hurt Democrats

salon.com — It’s hard to know what, exactly, the federal government can do to reduce the incidence of mass shootings. To a large degree, each shooting is sui generis—some shooters have been mentally ill, others haven’t. Some shooters have had concrete motivations, others, none at all. And while some shooters might have been stopped by tighter restrictions on guns and ammunition, others—like the shooter in Newtown—were able to rely on an existing and easy-to-access stockpile of weapons (in this case, his mother’s arsenal). With all of that said, Democrats shouldn’t be afraid of running with this issue. The common wisdom in the Democratic Party is that gun regulations—whether focused around control or safety—are an electoral loser; that they alienate the middle and working-class white men who are critical in Rust Belt and Midwestern states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa and Wisconsin.

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