You know I am still way more troubled over the killing of those little children

[Shamash]

8. Thank goodness France has strict gun regulation and a total assault rifle ban

Otherwise, who knows what might have happened if a couple crazies took offense at what some journalists had written.

To be less snarky, if >99.9% of gun owners are not part of the problem, then laws predominately affecting them are not part of the solution. If you want the support of gun owners in reforming gun control laws (remembering that >30% of Democrats are gun owners), then a good start would be to propose laws that do not presume gun owners in general are the problem.

Otherwise you are in the same moral position as someone who wants to restrict all men because a tiny minority are violent rapists, restrict all religions because a tiny minority are violent extremists or stop & frisk all young black men because a tiny minority are violent criminals. What happens? You instantly lose the support of that entire group and any politician who thinks they need that group to keep getting elected. In the case of guns, potentially 30% of the Democratic vote.

So, if you aim your ire at the actual problem rather than at all of "those people who look different than you", you won't get 25% of Senate Democrats voting against your proposed solution, which is exactly what happened with the Feinstein assault weapon ban last time it came up.

The knee-jerk "we gotta do something!" reaction that affects all gun owners hurts Democrats and helps Republicans. The Colorado recall election in 2013 proved that. Democrats outspent Republicans 6 to 1 and showed up at the polls with a 3 to 2 advantage over Republicans, in a recall election against two Democratic legislators from Obama+20 districts. And both Democrats lost their jobs. On a gun control issue.

Because moderate Democrats who owned guns voted against them.

We also lost Mark Udall(formerly D-Co), contributing to the new Republican Senate majority in Congress, and the Colorado legislature is now majority Republican. And the very first thing they did was put forth a bill to repeal Colorado's new gun laws. It won't pass, but only because we kept a Democratic governor by a 90,000 vote margin for a population of 5.4 million.

So I'm not exactly sure how the current tactic of demonizing all gun owners (especially here at DU) is reaping rewards in terms of a) keeping liberals in office and b) getting useful gun control measures passed.