"It is all about playing to the arch-conservative base," said Robert Spitzer, chairman of the political science department at the State University of New York at Cortland, who has written extensively on politics and gun control. He said that since the 1994 assault weapons vote, the NRA "locked itself into a pattern of ever more apocalyptic, extremist, uncompromising rhetoric." The progression, he said, coincided with the Republican Party's own shift to the right.

Source: Los Angeles Times March 03, 2018 10:52 UTC