Looks like a two-pronged approach:
1) Executive-order action to tighten up and improve flexibility on security and mental health with existing law. Which is what the gun-suckers are always clamoring for anyway.
2) Reinstatement of Brady Bill-style assault rifle restrictions and other measures that more or less bring us back to 1994-95 law.
3) The closure of the loopholes for gun show and person-to-person sales, thus putting a kink in straw-man purchasing and under-the-table acquisition of firearms (which, for all the butthurt from the gun-suckers, is a big part of how guns are criminally obtained).
In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t much. Hell, a majority of gun owners want to close the gun-show loophole. The country didn’t collapse into some sort of socialist fascist tyranny in the 1990s for want of superior civilian firepower, not even after Oklahoma City (when Republicans whined that anti-terrorism law would make a terrorist of any kid plugging a stop sign with a .22…an instructive contrast to the post-9/11 era). Under the circumstances, this is as modest an effort at curtailing gun violence as one can imagine. And right on cue, here come the gun-suckers, screaming for impeachment, screaming about tyranny, and already losing their shit.
See, the NRA is all about the people who want to need the guns. And that’s not suburbia. Suburbia hates guns. Suburbia doesn’t want to need guns. And the GOP willingly gave up the white middle-class suburban vote outside the South, and in doing so lost any sway over national Democrats. They took their best shot in 2012, they went all-in against a president who didn’t lift a finger against the proliferation of guns for four years, they insisted that he was the vanguard of Article 21 United Nations One World Zionist Occupation Government Tyranny…and they got beat.
The NRA has to be pissing themselves, because the House is the only thing keeping them from the full brunt of their efforts over the last 20 years to put an AR-15 in every pot. They have the Confederacy, and they have the rural turf, and they have the old white men – and that’s it. And consequently their numbers are dwindling. They were resoundingly clobbered in 2012, and now they’re paying the price for the Great Sorting that began in the 1990s. The South, the rurals, and the old white people are fully absorbed into the GOP. As long as there were still rural and/or Southern Democrats, there was still a modicum of bipartisanship in the gun crowd, and the NRA could have some pull with Democratic politicians – but the NRA went all in on the GOP and lost. And now the Democrats aren’t afraid of them anymore.
One step closer. The Civil Cold War gets warmer. The gun-suckers get more and more irate, and the GOP has to decide who it wants to go with. In the meantime, we wait to see just how far down the rabbit hole people are willing to go, and in a world where people are arguing that the Sandy Hook shootings were a hoax and a false-flag operation, that hole is pretty goddamned deep.
ETA: and right on cue, here come politicians from Tennessee and Mississippi arguing that they can somehow…what’s the word…nullify federal law. You remember how this finished last time.