In an ideal world, Second Amendment issues would truly be bipartisan. You’d have most from both parties respecting the right to keep and bear arms.

Unfortunately, we don’t have many Democrats like that in office these days. Sure, pro-gun Democrats still exist, but few are in office.

Which is a problem, because there are some inconsistencies in the party’s messaging.

Democrats can’t stop shooting themselves in the foot on gun control. Their mistake is that they refuse to connect their push for more firearm restrictions with, well, everything else they are doing.

The Democratic approach to guns is to wait until there is a mass shooting and then demand more gun control. But the narrow logic of their argument — that we should ban, or at least further restrict, the weapons used to commit the latest mass murder — is undermined by what Democrats do the rest of the time.

Except for those who are already ideologically committed to it, gun control is a high-trust proposal. People keep and bear arms to defend themselves, and so persuading citizens to limit or even give up their guns requires persuading them that they do not need them for protection. But voters do not view Democrats as prioritizing a country with low crime and high social trust. Rather, Democrats are seen as the soft-on-crime party, with a left flank that is committed to insane defund-the-police policies.

When Democratic prosecutors refuse to prosecute, when Democratic politicians enact revolving-door bail policies for violent criminals, when Democratic mouthpieces insist that violent and threatening lunatics on public transit should be accepted as a normal part of life, they are telling people they are on their own. And many Americans have gotten the message; the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots sold a lot of guns, many of them to new gun owners.

It’s kind of hard to convince someone that they don’t need a gun, they should just call the police while you’re also trying to make it impossible for the police to do anything.

However, what Democrats seem to do is look at each issue in a vacuum. They don’t look at how various things relate to one another unless they need it to try and justify their position. They can look at “gun deaths” and gun ownership and make the case that more guns lead to more crime, for example, because that crime helps them achieve their overall goal of gun control.

But for most things, they see the issue as an isolated issue.

To be fair, not everything is interconnected and so while there may be issues with their views, it’s not because they failed in this way.

Crime and guns, however, is a different matter.

On one hand, they’re empowering criminals like never before by defanging the police well beyond any reasonable limit, while also making it more difficult for you to protect yourself.

What they can’t seem to grasp is that there are situations where someone is going to get shot. What’s up for debate is whether that person is going to be the good guy or the bad guy.

Democrats in the halls of power seem inclined to make sure it’s the good guy no matter what, and that’s a big problem.

“But the bad guy’s mother didn’t hug him enough,” they’ll say (or something that boils down to this, at least), as if it’s somehow enough to justify you, the good guy, being wheeled into emergency surgery for multiple gunshot wounds.

It’s not.

Police reform isn’t a bad thing in and of itself. It can be done in ways that aren’t in conflict with the desire for gun control, even.

What we’re seeing ain’t that, though.

Instead, they just seem to want to make sure the criminals get a pass.