Cities facing a tough fight on gun control

The gunfight is over, and the cities lost. The question is: Do they realize it yet?

For decades now, large majorities of urbanites - the people, the politicians, the interest groups - have favored stricter controls on guns, for reasons city residents find self-evident. In the last five years in Philadelphia, 1,656 people have been slain, and of those, more than 1,300 died of gunshot wounds. For many city residents, myself included, guns represent a plague, not protection.

From the perspective of bloody Philadelphia, gun-rights advocates - and their allies in Harrisburg and Washington - appear all too willing to tolerate death in the city so they can protect the sanctity of the Second Amendment in the country.

Gun owners don't think about the debate in these terms, of course. They see gun control as an assault on a constitutionally guaranteed right, a classic case of government overreach that threatens their ability to protect their homes and families. What's more, many are convinced gun control actually leads to more violence, not less.

Right or wrong, their arguments are winning. Big. Cities would do well to realize that new gun-control legislation is, for now at least, a nonstarter, and to focus on other crime-fighting strategies.

Instead, we have New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg in a Super Bowl ad calling for "commonsense reforms that would save lives," while desperately trying to look like a regular guy and not some overbearing statist. Bloomberg is chairman of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a group that claims 600 members, including Mayor Nutter. Personally, I find its aims admirable, and given Bloomberg's immense personal fortune and political independence, he's well-suited to the quixotic role of gun-control champion.

In the short term, though, his agenda has no shot. According to an October Gallup poll, only 26 percent of Americans favor a handgun ban. More stunning is the finding that only 43 percent favored outlawing "assault rifles." Good luck, Mayor Bloomberg.

A couple of decades ago, those polling numbers were altogether different. In 1991, 60 percent of respondents told Gallup that handguns ought to be banned, and 78 percent favored more stringent controls.