@mystery-ak
This will get them more Independent voters who are parents. The Independents are neither R or D, and vote for whatever they think is best for them at the time. If this gun issue is still out front at the next Presidential election, the I parents will vote for gun control Dems.
I agree. The "gun control" issue has favored Republicans in the past, but that shouldn't lull conservatives into thinking it will always be thus. Las Vegas and Parkland are game changers, because there's no one who votes more conscientiously, and less ideologically, than parents. A parent wants to protect his or her child, and ideology and abstract notions like that we need gun rights to allow us to rise up against tyrants simply doesn't enter into it.
Tyrants aren't the problem - idiots shooting up schools and concerts are. And when the ideologues bark at each other and fail to comprehend the alarm that parents - and young people, the majority of victims in these shootings - feel, the majority of folks who are independents will be attracted first and foremost to those who promise to "do something". Gun owners will defend their rights, but they need to get outside their bubble sometime - the majority of folks, at a time like this, simply don't care.
I've made this point time and again with folks as I ride the train in the morning - what is the point of "doing something" that isn't efficacious? How is it good policy to try to address the bad guys by curbing the rights of the good guys? The response is always the same - we don't care. Gun owners have enough guns, it's time they listen to the rest of us.
Well, the Dems have found their issue. Not immigrants - guns. Guns is the issue they will run on in 2018, and from the looks of it, they are going to do exceedingly well. And the reason is exactly what
@Victoria33 suggests - parents.