Of the many ideological standoffs in the Barack Obama years, the battle over gun ownership may well expose the sharpest divisions in the American public—and within the recesses of the national psyche. “My biggest frustration,” Obama has said, “is the fact that this society has not been willing to take some basic steps to keep guns out of the hands of people who can do just unbelievable damage.” That was in June 2014—a year before a white supremacist massacred black worshippers in a church in Charleston, South Carolina; 18 months before the terrorist shootings in San Bernardino, California.
The new year began with another bleak episode, this one resembling a low-budget Hollywood western: armed “militiamen” seized control of a federal building at a wildlife refuge in rural Oregon. While authorities sifted through the dismal options—take on the outlaws and risk bloodshed? Do nothing and encourage anarchy?—Obama promised to enact mild gun-control restrictions via “executive actions.” This averted a showdown with Congress he would almost certainly lose, as he did in 2013, when the gun-control bill drafted after a gunman killed 20 schoolchildren in Newtown, Connecticut seemed sure to pass the Senate but was instead defeated.