An important shift is occurring away from the defeatist attitude that for too long undermined the Democratic Party’s commitment to greater gun safety.

The party’s wariness of the gun issue began with its defeat in the 1994 congressional elections and Al Gore’s failed run for the White House in 2000. National candidates like John Kerry and Barack Obama did not hit the issue hard in their presidential campaigns. But ghastly shooting sprees like the Newtown school massacre in 2012 have demanded solutions, prompting Democratic leaders to stress it prominently this year on their national agenda.

Hillary Rodham Clinton has been campaigning on the issue for weeks in gun-friendly primary states, offering no apology for embracing a topic that national Democratic candidates had avoided for the last 15 years, either because they thought progress was hopeless or because they feared giving the gun lobby political ammunition to use against them. She is proposing a series of strong gun safety steps that, while surely doomed in the current Republican Congress, have the virtue of forcing a national debate on a grave public health issue.

Image Hillary Rodham Clinton Credit... Darren Mccollester/Getty Images

Senate Democrats, defeated two years ago in their gun safety proposals made after Newtown, are reviving them as an important campaign priority. House Democrats are demanding the same sort of congressional investigation of the nation’s 30,000-plus annual gun deaths that Republicans haven’t hesitated to use against Planned Parenthood and on Benghazi.