Sweet reason is the tactic that has failed. Attempting to harness overwhelming public support is what has failed. Sweet reason is what happened after Sandy Hook, when a proposal the vast majority of the country favored was murdered in its crib by a radical right wing organization that pretends to be about gun rights.
The one tactic we have not tried is waging all out, unrestrained political war on the NRA. And that’s what we have to do now. Change the entire tenor of the nation’s feelings not simply about guns, because we’ve already won that fight, but about the NRA. Until belonging to the NRA or giving it money is about as respectable as being a member of MBLA or the Klan, there will be no progress. Until gun manufacturers run away from the NRA because of the stench, there will be no progress. Until we reduce that vile nest of blood drenched ghouls into an impecunious husk of its former self, there will be no progress.
And now we have that chance. If we don’t blow it. Demographics are on our side. The number of people who own guns is shrinking.
It’s the work of decades, but we have decades of trying to work with, around and against it and they keep winning. I’m not averse to continuing the sweet reason and triangulation approach, but mark my words, there will be no progress until the NRA has been crushed down to the point that their headquarters is auctioned off by a bankruptcy trustee and the post reorganization entity relocates to a cigarette smoke drenched used mobile home with an old-fashioned rotary dial phone, a dot matrix printer and a mimeograph machine.