The attempt on the life of Donald Trump was not the kind of thing any of us expected to happen, though I guess we probably should have. Say what you want about Trump, good or bad, but the man makes some people crazy. It was probably only a matter of time before someone got a shot off at the man.

But it happened and Trump survived, though not everyone was so fortunate.

Yet the attempt hasn't sparked calls for gun control from Republicans. None of the majority in the House have rolled out bills nor offered support for Democrat's measures.

So it seems at least one publication decided to figure out why.

One of the few calls to action in Congress after the July 13 shooting came from U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, who used his opening and closing statements during the panel’s July 22 hearing on the Trump shooting to call for stronger gun regulations.

“Part of the problem is people have resigned themselves to a brick wall of Republican obstruction on the issue,” Mr. Raskin, D-Md., said in an interview. “The vast majority of Americans would like to see universal violent criminal background checks, a ban on assault weapons and red flag laws. That agenda has to be as important to the majority as blocking that agenda is to a much smaller minority.”

...

The NRA did not respond to requests for comment.

At a news conference Thursday, Trump hit back against Harris on guns.

“She wants to take away everyone’s gun,” he said. “They need guns for protection in this country. People live out in the woods and they’re not going to have a gun.”

One reason there was little discussion of new gun legislation on Capitol Hill after the July 13 shooting is that political assassinations are viewed differently than other shootings, said U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who led a 2016 Senate Democratic filibuster to force action on gun legislation after 49 people were gunned down at an Orlando, Fla., gay nightclub.

“It is a narrative about politics, about the motivation of the shooter, about security,” he said in an interview. “I think it's unfortunate but understandable that we don't process assassinations in the same way we process a mass shooting. But there's no doubt that the gun facilitates political assassinations just like it facilitates mass murder.”

Actually, there's plenty of doubt.

We know the would-be assassin had explosives in his car, for example, meaning he still could have carried out his intent even without a gun, and explosives are far more tightly controlled than guns.

So yeah, there's doubt.

But what people like Raskin and Murphy miss, and that the reporter missed, is that people who had pro-gun positions aren't going to change their minds over something like this for the simple reason that nothing has changed.

See, the two lawmakers tend to argue that their pro-gun colleagues are really just bought and paid for by the gun lobby. They can't fathom a situation where someone might actually just disagree with their underlying premise, but that's exactly what's happening in most cases.

Pro-gun folks tend to believe that the issue with so-called gun violence of any stripe, including would-be assassination attempts, isn't that guns are available but that people think solving problems with violence is a good idea.

If you want that to change, you have to somehow show the underlying belief is faulty. Since people get murdered with knives, hammers, cars, and a host of other weapons, that's downright impossible to do because the belief isn't faulty at all. The attempt on Trump's life didn't come close to challenging that understanding. If anything, the presence of explosives in this dipstick's car illustrates just how sound the understanding is.

The attempt on Trump's life didn't spur action on guns because literally nothing changed. Trump himself is maintaining his opposition to an assault weapon ban despite having been the target, probably because he knows that the issue was a person and not the weapon.

Somehow, though, that never makes it in these kinds of pieces.

The reporter quoted Raskin and Murphy, two of the most anti-gun members of Congress, but didn't seem all that eager to reach out to that many pro-gun voices. Sure, they reached out to the NRA, though we don't know how long before their deadline they did so, but there's no quotes from anyone except for anti-gun politicians. As such, it seems that we can figure out for ourselves why the simple facts about why people are pro-gun in the first place and how the attempt changed none of that made it into this piece.

It's not much of a mystery.