How To Escape Gun Control Gridlock

Lee Drutman wrote for Noema Magazine on proportional representation and the politics of gun reform in the U.S.

After every mass shooting in the U.S., there’s a familiar cycle: Grief, outrage and frustration, followed by helplessness and the predictable sinking feeling that it will happen again, and soon, because our political system is incapable of doing something — anything — to stop it. Comparable democracies — Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United Kingdom — have passed common-sense gun reforms in the wake of mass shootings. But in the U.S., even the most marginal of meager reforms are fraught and controversial.

It doesn’t seem to matter that majorities of Americans support common sense gun reform, or that majorities of Americans vote for the party that promises common sense gun reform. Even majority support is not enough to pass national laws in what has become an anti-majoritarian system. Especially when those majorities support Democrats, nothing happens.

It is easy for supporters of gun control to feel like there is nothing that could break through. Republicans seem more convinced than ever that everything but the guns is the problem. And the necessary filibuster-busting majorities in the Senate feel out of reach for Democrats anytime soon.

The path to sensible gun reform isn’t just to elect more Democrats, lobby Republicans harder or donate to gun reform groups. We need to understand why, despite shooting after shooting, the prospects for meaningful national gun reform just seem to grow more dispiriting. We need to understand why we keep banging our heads into the same brick wall and winding up with the same dizzying concussions.

The way out involves the political system itself — namely, our binary two-party system and the single-member district electoral system that preserves it. Change that, and new possibilities open up. Not just on guns, but on almost every other issue that is gridlocked and divided now for the same reason. Climate. Immigration. Democracy itself.

If we break the binary and open up the party system by switching to multi-member districts with seats allocated through proportional representation (like most advanced democracies in the world already have), we can scramble and realign the divides that prevent progress on so many issues. It’s a straightforward solution that doesn’t require a constitutional amendment.

And as a bonus, it would have a bunch of other benefits as well, such as ending gerrymandering and increasing voter turnout (since under proportional representation, every vote would matter, motivating voters to show up to the polls at greater rates).