Why is President Obama pushing the gun issue? For John Hinderaker, the co-proprietor of the excellent Powerline blog, it’s a mystery. “I understand demagoguing an issue,” he writes, “but don’t politicians generally try to demagogue issues that are popular?”

I can think of two possible reasons Obama is investing so much political capital on the gun issue. One is that he is acting out of conviction. Like many liberals, he would like our country to be a gun-free nation, or one with as few guns in circulation as Canada, Australia or Britain. As Hinderaker notes, that is an impossible dream in a nation in which citizens own something upwards of 200 million guns and whose Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear arms, as the Supreme Court recognized in 2008. But, hey, he’s the president, he has power or the simulacrum thereof, and he’s going to try to make headway, however marginal or ineffective, toward his goal. That’s one reason.