"There's no denying that maintaining the high number of gun arrests and prosecutions is expensive, and the money available for that kind of law enforcement has indeed become scarcer because of budgetary constraints brought on by the Republican Congress."

I'll start with the Clinton years and remind everyone that it wasn't the Brady Bill or the Assault Weapons ban that made the real difference. It was the increased funding to police departments from his 1994 crime bill that showed real progress. I was on the White House lawn that day in October, 1994 when President Clinton was joined by an army of police chiefs and mayors to announce the $200 million being released to put 100,000 more cops on the streets. It's not clear just how close the Clinton Administration came to reaching that 100,000 number, but the message the funding sent had almost as much of an effect as however many new cops actually hit the streets.

The message was that police weren't the problem, which just a couple years after the Rodney King beating and subsequent L.A. riots wasn't such an easy thing for any Democrat to say. And President Clinton was never shy about trumpeting the falling crime statistics during his presidency. He and Hillary Clinton are trying to backtrack on that a bit now as the "Black Lives Matter" movement has started a new anti-cop sentiment in the new Democratic Party base, but there's really no denying that the increased Clinton administration funding for policing and incarceration made a difference.

Clinton's successor, President George W. Bush, saw similar successes with boosted funding for the FBI to go after gun runners and then his "Project SAFE" program in his second term aimed at prosecuting criminals who used guns. Project SAFE alone got more than $1.5 billion from the Bush administration. Violent crime fell sharply during the Bush years, even when compared with the already falling crime numbers under President Clinton.

But at the end of the Bush years, the focus shifted from gun prosecutions to new regulations. That was probably the result of Republicans losing control of Congress in the 2006 midterms and the Bush domestic agenda was gutted.

President Obama has sadly continued this trend. Thankfully, violent crime has mostly remained at historic lows. But prosecutions of gun-using criminals has decidedly gone down. Federal prosecutors brought a total of 5,082 gun violation cases in 2013 recommended by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, compared with a record 8,752 prosecutions of ATF cases brought by the Justice Department in 2004 under President Bush according to the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys.

There may be ideological reasons for this decline, as many of President Obama's critics insist the White House is more interested in scoring political points by harassing law abiding gun owners. But there's no denying that maintaining the high number of gun arrests and prosecutions is expensive, and the money available for that kind of law enforcement has indeed become scarcer because of budgetary constraints brought on by the Republican Congress. The White House may be blaming the GOP a little too much for the gun prosecution decline, but it does have a solid point. Both the Clinton crime initiatives and the Bush crackdown on illegal guns cost money, big money. And Republicans haven't been so forthcoming with budgetary cash lately.

That leaves us with a unique double "put your money where your mouth is moment" when it comes to guns in America. The Democrats, if they really want to slow gun violence in this country, need to put their money where their mouths are and support renewed efforts to enforce existing gun laws like Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush did in the recent past. Republicans, if they really want to prove they believe enforcing the existing gun laws is all we need to do, need to put their money where their mouths are and get proactive about offering real funding for that enforcement up front.

So far, both sides just aren't stepping up to the plate. So we're stuck with stunts like sit-ins and scare tactics. I remain convinced that the presidential candidate who refocuses the gun debate towards a push for more funding would enjoy a significant boost in the polls. The question is: which candidate is smart enough to simply promote what we already know works?