With Vice President Kamala Harris helming the effort, though, it may be a sign of surrender.

Notably, though, the big push here is Harris asking state legislators to take up these proposals, not for the federal government. Even Harris, who adores the idea of the executive branch wielding monarchic power, sees that there is no avenue nor appetite for a grand federal gun control push. She wants to punt it to the states, where that power already belongs and where Democrats have already been talking about “assault weapons” bans and other gun control cliches for years before this.

Harris and Biden are going through the motions here, but it is clear that the surge in gun ownership during the pandemic (partially due to Democrats ignoring gun crimes from actual criminals) has changed the political landscape on this question. Democrats have simply run out of ammunition, and it appears that even they have pushed gun control way down on the list of priorities.

Now, this is an intriguing notion, but is it accurate? If the White House has given up on gun control, why even do this?

The answer is pretty simple. Their anti-gun allies wanted the Office of Gun Violence Prevention and they wanted it to coordinate efforts between gun control groups and the states. So, they had to do something with it in order to appease those groups.

President Joe Biden is running for reelection. That means he needs his allies all invested in his winning. He’s counting on them not just donating to his campaign but conducting ad buys in swing states independent of his campaign.

So he can’t afford to just shrug and call it a day.

But he likely knows that absolutely nothing is going to happen. Trotting out Harris and this office, presenting gun control policy recommendations that we’ve all seen before and have already been passed in states likely to pass them.

So, he’s likely going through the motions.

That’s especially important as we find that more and more Democrats are becoming gun owners. Right now, they might still support gun control, but a lot of them are also learning the hard reality of gun laws in the United States right now.

For example, a lot of them learned during the pandemic that no, you can’t actually buy a gun online. A lot of them learned that there is no gun show loophole.

All of this means that Democratic support for gun control may well begin to wane in the next few years, especially as more people recognize that the crime surge we’ve seen was because of things like defunding police departments–or even just talking about it–and criminal justice reform efforts that put bad guys back out on the streets.

Because of that, it’s not surprising that the White House may well be preparing to step back from its anti-gun push to some degree, not doing more than the minimum to appease their allies without really putting enough into it to alienate those new gun-owning Democrats.

Or it could just be that they’re figuring this is all they can do now and think they’ll win back the House in November and maybe get a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate to boot.

Sure. That could happen.

I might also be named Lord Emperor of the Universe, too.