The administration, however, will have to tread carefully to avoid provoking the very behavior it means to deter.

government to take further substantial regulatory steps and to lay the groundwork for effective legislation should the Democrats consolidate their Senate majority in 2022. A plausible objective would be to impel the U.S. But reframing the issue as a national security imperative could galvanize passive backers now focused by the assault on the Capitol on maintaining political stability in the United States. While gun control is now unlikely to lose existing supporters, it is also unlikely to win many new ones. Generating bipartisan consensus for an effective crackdown on firearms will always be difficult. At least one key Republican senator, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, has expressed openness to working with Biden on a gun bill. An important additional measure would be more rigorous required background checks.

But his call for reviving the federal ban on assault weapons is more promising and an acknowledgment that serious action is required. The executive orders Biden issued earlier this month imposing restrictions on gun kits and devices that turn pistols into rifles are marginal safeguards and rather thin gruel overall. It is that they make mass casualty attacks against political or cultural adversaries both easy to carry out, and easy to frame as inspirational events of the kind that mobilize insurrection. military on the battlefield, which they certainly will not. The concern isn’t that these weapons will somehow enable militias to challenge the U.S. These groups, with transnational ties, also enjoy easy access to high-power, high-capacity, small-caliber semiautomatic weapons-many of which can be converted to fully automatic. gun violence is a “national embarrassment.” But as National Security Council veterans who have specialized in counterterrorism-with direct experience involving far-right American terrorism, burgeoning jihadism, and Northern Irish extremism in the 1990s-we also see a new threat rising, one that has the potential to change the urgency of the debate: the growing, and heavily armed, American militia movement, which made a show of force on January 6.Īs America learned on January 6, anti-government militia groups are more than willing to jump walls, break doors and disrupt the underpinnings of our democracy. We share Biden’s view that the level of U.S. Despite the anguish over the past month - and despite a push by President Joe Biden - Congress looks unlikely to take any immediate action. Last week, nine people were killed by AR-15 fire in Indianapolis before that, 10 died in Boulder, and eight in Atlanta. Jonathan Stevenson, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies and managing editor of Survival, served on the NSC as director for political-military affairs, Middle East and North Africa, from 2011 to 2013.įor all the tragic mass shooting headlines this year, the American gun control debate seems permanently stuck. Steven Simon, an international relations professor at Colby College, served on the National Security Council during the Clinton and Obama administrations, including as senior director for counterterrorism. Opinion by Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson

Nag about gun control