Republicans are quietly winning the political fight on guns
Instead of consequential reforms, the debate has narrowed to tax breaks on silencers.
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Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia — a gun shop owner, election denier, and insurrection defender who rode to Congress on his opposition to covid-era public health measures — believes in freedom. Or one kind of freedom, anyway: the freedom to buy and sell guns and gun accessories of all kinds with the least regulation and taxation possible.
To that end, he persuaded his colleagues to include in their enormous budget bill a provision repealing part of the National Firearms Act, which requires those who purchase a silencer to pay a $200 tax and register their device with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF).
You might ask if this was something that cried out for a policy change, but to Rep. Clyde, that would make you almost an enemy of the Creator himself.
“The Second Amendment is an inalienable constitutional right — God-given — that governments are required to protect, not to tax,” he said.
Surely you recall the biblical verse in which God says “Lo have I given unto thee the instruments to pump hot lead into thine enemies/No king shall tax thy silencers.” Was that in Leviticus? Deuteronomy? Something like that.
But the Lord works in mysterious ways, and Clyde’s divinely-inspired crusade was dealt a blow last week when the Senate parliamentarian ruled that the silencer provision violated the rules of budget reconciliation and had to be stripped from the bill. Not to be swayed from their mission, GOP senators revised the language and put the silencer provision back into the version of the bill that passed the Senate. (The House was amid a lengthy test vote on the latest version of the reconciliation bill as this newsletter was finalized late Wednesday.)
As a question of both rights and safety, this seems almost meaningless. Nobody’s liberty hinges on whether they can buy a silencer without paying a tax. On the other hand, despite what the movies have led you to believe, silencers don’t actually silence a gunshot; they just make it slightly less loud. It’s a demonstration of how far we’ve come that consequential national gun reforms are barely being debated; now we’re reduced to talking about tax breaks on silencers.
With Republican power at its modern apex, the regulation-free, gun-saturated world they always dreamed of creating has never been closer to realization.
So much winning
Not too long ago, the political story of guns revolved around the power of the National Rifle Association. The group was universally feared for its ability to punish all who opposed it; any member of Congress who supported even the mildest of gun restrictions could expect a flood of money and organizing aimed at booting them from office.
But when was the last time you heard about the NRA flexing its political muscles? The interest group that once had few peers in its influence has become almost irrelevant. That’s partly because it has been mired in scandal and mismanagement, but also because most of its goals have been accomplished.
For that, more than anyone else we can blame the conservative majority on the Supreme Court. In 2022, they decided in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen that any state or federal restriction on guns is unconstitutional unless one can find a similar legal restriction from the time of the nation’s founding. Justice Clarence Thomas’s decision took “originalism,” the disingenuous legal methodology in which conservatives search the historical record for justification for whatever outcomes they want to produce, to an absurd degree.
Bruen was like a shot from a starting pistol. The result in lower courts was predictable chaos as judges and their clerks are now forced to act as amateur historians, attempting to figure out which line in the Federalist Papers or 1712 regulation from the Virginia House of Burgesses should govern our laws today. The Trace, a news site that covers gun issues, found over 2,000 criminal and civil cases seeking to overturn gun laws since Bruen was decided. While most of these challenges have failed — they usually involve criminal defendants seeking to invalidate the legal ban on those with felony convictions holding guns — the data shows courts around the country facing these challenges and ruling on them in inconsistent ways.
The Supreme Court isn’t much help, since the standard Thomas created provides little guidance on how any particular case should be decided. For instance, the justices ruled 8-1 in US vs. Rahimi (2024) that it was legal for the state to take away guns from a violent domestic abuser, even though there were no such laws 250 years ago. The simple fact was that a different outcome made even the conservatives feel icky (except for Thomas, the lone dissenter), so they pretended there was a coherent legal principle underlying their decision.
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But that was an exception. Courts have repeatedly struck down state restrictions in the last few years, citing Bruen. For instance, an appeals court recently nullified a California law limiting gun purchases to one a month. Appeals courts have reached contradictory rulings on whether states can impose age restrictions on gun purchases, or must allow everyone over 18 to buy them, and the Supreme Court has declined to settle the question. The Court struck down a ban on “bump stocks,” which enable rapid fire akin to a machine gun, but allowed the government to require serial numbers and background checks on the sale of “ghost gun” kits.
So while Bruen didn’t immediately wipe away any and all state laws regulating guns, it made them all vulnerable — and in the end, this extremely pro-gun Supreme Court will pick and choose whichever laws it prefers to leave in place and which it wants to strike down.
The Trump administration is not waiting
As soon as it took office, the second Trump administration made clear that it was determined to loosen gun regulations wherever it could.
Trump quickly signed an executive order instructing the attorney general to scour “orders, regulations, guidance, plans, international agreements, and other actions of executive departments and agencies” in order to find “infringements of the Second Amendment rights of our citizens” to target for elimination. The Justice Department settled a lawsuit allowing the sale of a device that effectively turns semiautomatic rifles into machine guns, which are otherwise restricted by federal law. And the Washington Post recently published an investigation showing that DOGE has descended on the ATF.
DOGE’s apparent goal is to do to the agency what it did to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Agency for International Development: eliminate personnel, gut its ability to do its legally mandated work, and eventually destroy it altogether. The paper describes “a seismic shift unfolding at ATF as the Trump administration proposes slashing the law enforcement agency’s budget and dramatically reducing the number of inspectors who ensure that gun sellers are in compliance with federal laws.” Inspectors are already stretched thin; under current plans, their numbers would be reduced by two-thirds.
While the administration is doing what it can to quash both regulation and enforcement, there are still vigorous debates at the state level — especially in blue states — around specific measures that the Supreme Court has yet to outlaw: red flag laws, background checks, magazine capacity limits, measures on where you can take your guns (e.g. bars and universities), and more.
Meanwhile in red states, legislators have almost run out of regulations they can eliminate. In Texas, the GOP-dominated state legislature recently passed laws legalizing sawed-off shotguns, barring cities from holding gun buybacks, and banning judges from imposing red-flag orders. Firing your six-guns into the air like Yosemite Sam remains illegal, at least for now.
While no one provision may have a transformative effect, these state laws can accumulate to change the risk people face. Evidence shows that the looser a state’s gun regulations are, the higher the level of gun violence it has. A recent study showed that states that weakened their gun laws in recent years experienced significant increases in the number of children being killed with firearms.
And the rate of gun deaths varies tremendously by state; in 2022, the latest year for which we have figures, the gun death rate was 3.1 per 100,000 people in Rhode Island, but 29.6 per 100,000 in Mississippi, almost 10 times as high. If the whole country had Rhode Island’s rate, it would mean we’d have 10,603 gun deaths this year — still an appalling number by any reasonable standard, but a fraction of the recent high of nearly 49,000 we saw in 2021, during the spike in both gun sales and violent crime the country saw amid the covid pandemic. But if the whole country had Mississippi’s rate, that number would be well over 100,000 gun deaths per year.
If gun advocates had their way, we’d all be living in their world, with almost no gun regulation, no state able to make its own choices about what limits it wanted to impose, and more guns in more places, adding to the estimated 400 million already in circulation in the US. Thankfully, we’re not there yet. But they’re doing their best to make it happen, with every bit of power at their disposal.
That’s it for today
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Just over a month ago the Court declined to hear challenges to state gun laws allowing semi-automaric weapons and high capacity magazines. I take that as an unwillingness to revisit the complexities coming out of the Bruen decision. The Republicans may be winning the never-ending political fight, but theirs is only a temporary gain. The 2nd amendment religion is not universally shared by the majority of voters who favor numerous restrictions in gun manufacture, ownership and use.
I was able to better understand that we face a cult. Therefore rational thinking is not to be expected. Now the cult members are too ashamed to admit they have screwed up. There is a way for us to rescue some. https://hotbuttons.substack.com/p/mired-republican-cult?r=3m1bs