It's discouraging to think about how broken our very system and institutions are at this moment. Some of that, obviously, is a product of Trump, but Trump represents the logical end point of the Republican Party become a soft-authoritarian, Christianist party. Simply removing Trump from office won't solve that problem.
New Zealand looks like it will make the sort of meaningful, far-reaching gun control reform that Australia made after the Port Darwin shooting. There are cultural reasons why New Zealand will embrace this in ways that America won't. There are a sizable number of Americans who revere their guns, and there is nothing we can do to change that. However, there is also sizable support in America for universal background checks and hard limits on certain types of weapons, and we won't do anything about that until we have a very different government.
But even if President Harris sits down with Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Schumer in 2021, there are still huge impediments to even the sanest and easiest of gun control measures. First is that damned Second Amendment and the various court decisions like Heller that have buttressed individual arsenals in ways that seem anathema to the intent of the Second Amendment. The second is the nature of the Senate. You either need 60 Democratic Senators or to eliminate the filibuster.
Of course, the Hot Takes on Twitter will insist this is because Nancy Pelosi isn't a true Progressive or because the NRA buys politicians. But the NRA doesn't HAVE to buy politicians and there is nothing Pelosi can do.
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