Earlier in the year, as the gun-control movement tried clumsily to transform an abomination into a cudgel, the Washington Post’s Kathleen Parker distilled its problem into a single sentence. “Nothing proposed in the gun-control debates would have prevented the mass killing of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School,” Parker contended plainly, “and everybody knows it.”

This was abundantly clear at the time, and it is even more so in retrospect. And yet I must nitpick ever so slightly with Parker’s excellent contention, for it is missing the crucial word “almost.” Almost everybody knows it. The public seems to know it. Legislators seem to know it. But, judging by the abundance of vexed anniversary columns, a significant cabal of journalists and activists have never got the message. A year later, their cry is as it was at the outset: Why won’t we act?

To wish to prevent another Sandy Hook is an admirable and human instinct. But to chase placebos? That is infinitely less commendable. Typically, when government inaction is the complaint, it is beneficial to eschew emotion in favor of a couple of hard questions. The first is “What is it that you want the state to do?”; the second, “How would the state’s doing this affect the problem?” In this case, the “what” was the Toomey-Manchin bill, which would have forced all the states to run background checks on all private transfers and sales of firearms. And the answer to “What would it have done?”: Nothing.

As a few of the more honest advocates of gun control acknowledged at the time, it is just about possible to argue with a straight face that universal background checks could help to prevent or diminish the general rate of gun crime. But it is certainly not possible to claim that they would prevent or even diminish the number of mass shootings. In fact, to argue that such a requirement would have done anything whatsoever to stop recent massacres isn’t just wrong — it’s deeply dishonest. Those who have been chastising Congress for not reacting to massacres by passing legislation that has nothing to do with massacres should be ashamed of themselves.

In the Huffington Post on Wednesday, Sam Stein and Sam Wilkes complained rather predictably that “progress on gun control seemed inevitable after Sandy Hook, but apparently that was wrong.” Given their preferences, I’d ask them the same thing as I would the president: What sort of “progress” is passing a law that has nothing to do with the problem you’re trying to solve? The answer is none at all. In truth, the Left’s knee-jerk reaction to gun violence represents quite the opposite of forward thinking, based as it is on fear, superstition, and good old-fashioned ignorance. However nicely they package their schemes, an informed, reasonable, and free people should adamantly resist the instincts of men who sound the old cry, “Do something, anything!” — even, and perhaps especially, if the event that led them there was unspeakably, unutterably, unthinkably grim.

“and everybody knows it.”

This was abundantly clear at the time, and it is even more so in retrospect. And yet I must nitpick ever so slightly with Parker’s excellent contention, for it is missing the crucial word “almost.” Almost everybody knows it. The public seems to know it. Legislators seem to know it.

The Democrats up for re-election this year won their seats in 2008, which was a Democratic wave year. Because of this, there is quite a lot of exposure for Obama’s party.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/12/12/senate_seats_that_could_flip_parties_in_2014.html