Glenn Reynolds: Obama saves himself by gunning down Democrats' electoral chances Talking about gun control keeps the spotlight off foreign policy failure and a sputtering U.S. employment engine.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds | USA TODAY

So after last week’s mass shooting in Oregon, President Obama chose to go on TV right away, even before all the facts were in about what had happened. Then he issued a bold call: It was time, he said, to “politicize” the tragedy, in service of getting rid of guns. He chose Australia — which implemented draconian gun confiscation in the 1990s — as a model of where America should be heading.

This sort of presidential action doesn’t happen by accident. For Obama to have stepped forward on this issue, at this moment, means that he and his advisers think it’s helpful to him. (Even though, in 2008, Obama told voters: “I believe in people’s lawful right to bear arms. I will not take your shotgun away. I will not take your rifle away. I won’t take your handgun away.”) But how, exactly, is it helpful?

After all, no significant gun legislation — and certainly nothing like Australia-style confiscation — is going to make it through a Republican Congress. And gun control isn’t especially popular anymore anyway: As a Pew poll released last year demonstrated, more Americans support gun rights than gun control, representing a dramatic change over the situation a few decades ago.

It’s a bad electoral issue for Democrats. Obama knew that in 2008 when he promised not to go after people’s guns. And today, Republicans are hoping that Obama goes there. The Washington Free Beacon's Sonny Bunch wrote last Friday, “If you want to guarantee that Hillary Clinton loses, liberals, press her to call for stricter gun laws and hint that you want to take their Glocks from them.”

So if the issue is a loser for Obama and the Democrats, why make a big deal about it? Well, the answer is, that when we’re talking about guns, a bad issue for Obama, we’re not talking about other things that pose worse issues for Obama. And the list of those is long.

In Syria, Putin is making Obama look weak, ordering U.S. planes out of the sky, bombing CIA-supported rebels, and allying with Iranian troops. Obama has no real response, leading to The Economist headline, "Putin Dares, Obama Dithers.”

Meanwhile, despite Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, the 14-year-old war in Afghanistan goes on, with U.S. forces apparently bombing a civilian hospital run by Doctors Without Borders by mistake, killing many.

In Ukraine, Russia is deploying new, more advanced missiles. Putin is also building a major base near the Ukraine-Russia border.

After the Chinese Office of Personnel Management hack that some (including me) described as a ”cyber Pearl Harbor,” it turns out that way more fingerprint data was stolen than OPM originally reported. And the CIA was forced to pull spies out of China for fear that the hack compromised their identities.

Here at home, the Secret Service joined the list of agencies in the Obama Administration found to have abused its powers to target political opponents — in this case, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, — and then the Secret Service director changed his story, backing away from original claims that he didn’t know about it.

Meanwhile, the latest jobs numbers show a record 94,610,000 Americans not in the work force, for the lowest labor participation rate in 38 years, even as the economy shows other signs of sputtering.

And, of course, there’s the steady drip, drip of the Hillary Clinton email scandal. With Hillary, Obama’s secretary of State for most of his presidency, and with questions about how much the president and other officials knew about her shady practices, he’d just as soon we didn’t talk about it.

In fact, Obama would just as soon we didn’t talk about any of these debacles. The gun issue may not be a winner for him, but it’s an ideologically divided issue where most Democrats will take his side, and it’s a hot-button issue that lets him inflame debate just by bringing it up.

These other stories, meanwhile, raise questions about Obama’s presidency that even Democrats are finding hard to ignore. Is it any wonder that Obama would rather talk about guns?

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, and a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

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