To be clear, I don't think it's exclusively centrist to adopt the pragmatic position of "take what you can get," and obviously I am not saying that the bill should fail (though I am loathe to assume in advance that it will pass). But it is, almost by definition, a centrist measure, meant to appease both sides of an evenly divided Senate. It does very little to limit gun sales overall and a lot to limit access to those sales--not what's being sold but who it's being sold to. The additional focus on mental health and crisis intervention shoehorned in here in lieu of banning certain types of weapons is a centrist measure. That's not to say it won't work, though McP is right to suggest that we need to define the terms of what "working" would look like, and that's not to say that we should give up if the proposed legislation won't completely fix the problem. But we should call it what it is.Rob wrote:And I don’t think that’s a centrist view. It’s a view that you take what you can get whenever you can get it. That’s always been Bernie’s view, he’s no centrist.
There's nothing wrong with centrist measures in themselves, and I think they can certainly work as first steps towards more systemic change unless they serve as bulwarks against future measures (in a sort of "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" approach), or are taken up as some sort of defacto victory of centrism over more polarizing political tendencies (what Bi_3 did here when posting the link). I think the latter is incredibly suspect. If you're looking for legislative solutions then your only option is centrism given the current Senate composition, so to turn around and say "look what centrism can achieve!" is a form of begging the question. It purposefully winnows the horizon for political action. Dunno about you but that seems bad to me!
