From the DAILY BEAST:
…Yet the Brady Bill, which required federally licensed gun dealers to perform background checks on people who buy guns, was the last of the major gun laws inspired by a shooting incident. And given that it took more than a dozen years for the law to be passed, it was a harbinger of the difficulties gun control advocates would face in years to come.
What changed? Perhaps the most important cause of the shift was the growing political influence of the NRA—and the decreasing strength of the gun control movement. Although the National Rifle Association has been around since just after the Civil War, the organization became radicalized in the mid-1970s after a group of hardline gun control opponents took the helm. The new NRA made fighting to defeat gun control its signature issue. When Democrats lost their majority in the House of Representatives for the first time in 1994—which no less an expert than President Bill Clinton blamed on the passage of the Brady Bill—the party traditionally open-minded about gun control dropped the issue. …
Another reason for the inability of gun control to move is the difficulty of finding effective laws to prevent the shootings. Klebold and Harris, the Columbine killers, were already barred by federal law from purchasing guns due to their age. Yet they easily found a friend old enough to go to a gun show and buy the guns—illegally—for them. The Giffords shooting led to calls to ban the sale of guns, like the one Loughner used, capable of holding more than ten rounds. But there are already tens of millions of such guns already in circulation. And although we don’t know much yet about the Aurora shooting, it appears the gunman used multiple firearms—an easy end-run around laws that limit the number of rounds a gun can hold…
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