In the wake of Uvalde and Buffalo, Democrats have been pushing for more and more gun control. Much of the rhetoric has involved things like assault weapon bans and even restrictions on things like 9 mm handguns. That’s going to be a tough sell to the American people, even after a spate of high-profile shootings.

Yet it seems many in the party are focused on somewhat less controversial measures.

But Congressional Democrats are taking a modest approach to gun control measures in the wake of the Uvalde school tragedy that killed 19 children and two teachers.

They aren’t talking about a ban on assault-style rifles, like the weapon used in Texas, or a ban on high-capacity magazines, like the 30-round magazines the shooter took to the school, The Hill observed.

Democrats are instead focused on expanding background checks or encouraging states to establish red flag laws that remove guns from people deemed dangerous to themselves or others.

“It’s really a study of incrementalism, I think that’s what [Sen.] Chris Murphy is doing,” said Ross K. Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University, referring to the lead Democrat negotiator on gun control.

“He’s come to the realization that if he leads with an assault-weapons ban, it’s not going to go anywhere. To get the 10 Republicans you need to break the filibuster, you can’t lead with a strong right hand. You’ve got to spar a little bit,” Baker said to The Hill.

“Republicans are not willing to support everything that I support, like banning assault weapons. But I really think that we could pass something that saves lives and breaks this logjam that we’ve had for 30 years,” Connecticut Democrat Sen. Murphy said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday.

Except for the fact that New York had both red flag laws and universal background checks and they did nothing at all to prevent the Buffalo shooting.

In fact, looking at violent crime in New York City–a place where the gun control laws go well beyond such simple measures–it’s not clear that those laws have accomplished literally anything.

But I’ll agree that they’ve got a better chance of passage than assault weapon bans and gun registration ever would.

That doesn’t mean they should, though.

Look, violence isn’t as simple as saying, “If we restrict guns, everything will be great.” The world doesn’t work that way. We have to understand and address the roots of violent crime in the United States.

Yet Democrats tend to have no interest in doing so. They want to restrict our right to keep and bear arms and they’ll exploit every tragedy they can to get it.

For all their ridicule of “thoughts and prayers,” the truth is that they’ll morbidly use the bodies of slain children as a soapbox to capitalize on those same children’s deaths to advance an agenda that wouldn’t have actually stopped their murder.

It’s disgusting, yet here we are.

So while some Democrats do seem to be a tad more reasonable in what they want, none of it is actually reasonable. They’re pushing for policies that failed in Buffalo as if they’re somehow going to protect innocent life rather than actually trying to do something actually useful.