The dark reason why guns are virtually guaranteed to be a major issue of the 2016 campaign
Maxwell Tani
Mike Huckabee
(Keith Bedford) Republican presidential candidate and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee on a hunting trip in Osceola, Iowa.
Standing in front of the White House press corps on Thursday, President Barack Obama appeared as exasperated as he has been in his presidency.
Following yet another mass shooting — this time at a community college in Oregon that left 10 dead — Obama took the podium at the White House press room. He delivered an impassioned, at times angry address criticizing opponents of stricter gun laws.
"This is something we should politicize. It is relevant to our common life together," Obama said. "This is a political choice we make to allow this to happen every few months in America."
"How can you, with a straight face argue that more guns will make us safer?"
After years of ducking presidential-campaign battles over gun laws out of fear of the powerful gun lobby, it appears that Democrats are finally ready to politicize the issue and go on the offensive.
Democrats are becoming more and more outspoken about gun violence in the wake of seemingly ever-increasing mass shootings, despite the fact that the American public remains as opposed as ever to many gun-control measures.
And the increase in mass shootings has guaranteed that candidates will have to address the issue on the campaign trail, setting it up to become a major issue in the 2016 presidential election.
Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton, for example, set the tone early in her campaign after a mass shooting at a historically African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina.
She has become much more vocal in her calls for stricter gun laws, making it a recurring feature in her stump speeches and addressing the issue bluntly when confronted by reporters. Following the Oregon shooting on Thursday, Clinton immediately told CNN's Dan Merica that it was yet another reason why she supported universal background checks.
"It is just beyond my comprehension that we are seeing these mass murders happen again and again and again. And as I have said, we have got to get the political will to do everything we can to keep people safe," Clinton told CNN on Thursday.
Hillary Clinton
(AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall) Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks during an interview with The Associated Press, Monday, Sept. 7, 2015, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Obama has labeled the failure of Congress to pass new gun laws the biggest frustration of his tenure. He has spoken out multiple times recently on the subject, including after the Charleston shooting that killed nine people.
"I've had to make statements like this too many times," Obama said after the Charleston shooting. "At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other developed countries."
This is a major shift from 2008, when both Clinton and Obama were criticized for failing to talk about the issue. During the heat of the 2012 campaign, Obama was reluctant to bring up the topic of guns even after the mass shooting at a Colorado movie theater. Passing gun-control measures, Democrats have long argued, had helped lead Democrats to overwhelming losses in the 1994 midterms, which swept Republicans into power in Congress.
The new focus, then, is an interesting political calculus — because many signs actually show that Americans' support for gun rights is growing.
Gun-rights advocates have also experienced success in state legislatures, beyond helping to block Democrats' federal legislation that would have expanded background checks on gun purchases. In almost three years since the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, 70 of 109 state gun laws have actually loosened restrictions, according to The New York Times.
But gun-safety groups say that below the surface, there is growing support for certain goals.
Citing broad support for background checks and a few legislative wins in the 2014 midterm elections, Everytown — the group co-chaired by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg — argued that opposition to gun-rights groups like the National Rifle Association is much more organized and motivated even than it was in 2008 when Clinton last ran for president.
"Previously, people talked about an intensity gap, that, 'Yeah, everybody agrees, but this isn't anybody's No. 1 issue,' and we've seen that change dramatically in the last few years because of the big events, and the ones that don't make as much news," Erika Soto Lamb, Everytown's communication director, told Business Insider earlier this year.
ted cruz gun
(AP) Sen. Ted Cruz.
Lamb acknowledged that in the past, gun-rights groups have scared lawmakers into silence. Now, she said, high-profile horrific shootings have forced candidates to talk about the dangers of guns more frequently.
"I worked here in 2012, and I know how hard it was to get the candidates to address gun violence," Lamb said. "The candidates have been talking about guns far more than they did then."
But if increasingly strong rhetoric from Clinton and financial backing from Bloomberg worries gun-advocacy groups, it doesn't show.
Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, provided a reminder that President Bill Clinton himself admitted that threatening gun rights can be a perilous issue politically.
"Hillary Clinton is repeating the error her husband made in 1994 — pushing for gun-control legislation. He realized his mistake and said so," Pratt told Business Insider in a recent interview. "Hillary is so ideological that she seems oblivious to the reality of gun-control politics. She seems doomed to repeat her husband's political error."
Lafayette shooting
(REUTERS/Lee Celano) Christian Wise, left, and Britney Landry, right, embrace other mourners outside a rosary service for Mayci Breaux in Franklin, Louisiana, July 24, 2015.
For their part, Republican candidates aren't backing down. They have argued that if more citizens were armed, more mass shootings could be prevented.
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) railed against "gun free" zones earlier this year, suggesting that a well-trained citizen with a gun could've stopped a shooting at a Louisiana movie-theater.
Following the Connecticut shooting that left 20 children and six others dead in 2012, Huckabee wrote on Facebook that not all victims of shootings want stricter gun laws imposed, pointing to a survivor of a mass shooting who now advocates for more relaxed gun laws.
Other candidates have tried to use shootings to remind voters of where they stand on certain issues.
That's what former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum (R) did following the Charleston shooting, claiming that the shooting was part of a larger attack on religious freedom. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), meanwhile, said that even in the wake of a tragedy, government is not the answer. And after the Oregon shooting, Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) rejected calls for new gun measures.
"The people who are going to commit crimes or have problems are always going to have the guns. And I think more and more people feel like, 'I'd like to be able to protect myself,'" he said in an NBC interview
But mass shootings, which tend to dominate news cycles, are occurring more and more frequently.
As Mother Jones points out, the number of days between mass shootings has dropped dramatically in recent years, from 220 between 1995 and 2005 to 99 between 2005 and 2015.
