2013 is back with a vengeance. After Republicans spent the better part of September flirting with the prospect of what would likely have been an ill-fated government shutdown, congressional Democrats are preparing for a renewed legislative push in favor of new gun control laws.

Let us begin by conceding that both parties are acting in good faith. The Republican struggle to withhold taxpayer funds from Planned Parenthood is borne out of a deeply held conviction among conservatives that supporting this institution’s activities is morally and legally wrong. Similarly, the widely-shared perception among liberals that failing to enhance gun regulations is dangerous and irresponsible has prompted this latest legislative drive. Both can be fairly described as partisan crusades, but only one is characterized as the noble pursuit of a lost cause while another is derided as the myopic fixation of a movement bent on its own marginalization. In fact, both causes can be fairly described as the province of partisan political activists.

The bodies had not yet been publicly identified following the shooting of students at an Oregon college last week before the President of the United States took to a lectern in the White House and angrily demanded more from the public he led. “This is something we should politicize,” he said of the tragic deaths of nine people. Dutifully, outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid rushed to announce his intention to relight the fire under the left’s perennial push for new gun control laws, regardless of whether they would have deterred or prevented the latest mass shooting.

“We’ll see whether the people who have no solution, who just want to keep talking about guns, are willing to meet us halfway,” said Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn who seemed to entertain the idea of pursuing another bipartisan bargain on federal gun regulation. It was a bit of magnanimity that Reid, who announced his intention to pursue new gun laws by calling Republicans “puppets” of the NRA, did not deserve. Cornyn knows all too well that Democrats in the Senate are not interested in new gun laws so much as they are in posturing for their voters who are in as angry and emotional a mood as are Donald Trump-backing conservatives.

In a way, conservatives should be thankful to a dominant culture among mainstream political analysts that is generally friendly toward liberal policy goals. Republicans are regularly disabused of the notion that their legislative campaigns are anything other than quixotic, whereas liberal commentators have an unhelpful tendency to inflate Democratic egos when they go tilting after windmills.

Unless they are particularly well sequestered, Republicans are usually fully aware of the public’s antipathy toward shutting down the government, regardless of the relative popularity (Planned Parenthood) or unpopularity (ObamaCare) of the object they are seeking to rob of taxpayer funding. Democrats rarely have a similar advantage. On the topic of gun control, pollsters are all too eager to mislead the left into believing that they have the backing of a staggering majority of the public. In reality, they don’t.

A Morning Consult survey conducted in the wake of the Oregon shooting found 55 percent of registered voters backing stricter gun laws. Eye-popping majorities of Democratic, Republican, and independent voters back such boilerplate measures as background checks on private sales, a ban on ill-defined “assault weapons,” and the elimination of high-capacity magazines. But when asked if voters prefer stricter gun control measures, only a majority of Democrats agreed. Just one-third of independent voters and less than one-quarter of GOP survey respondents welcomed new gun control measures.

“So there’s hope that the current Congress could pass some sort of legislation that addresses gun violence, but it may depend on how the issue is framed,” New York Magazine’s Margaret Hartmann wished. No, there probably isn’t.

We’ve been through all this before. Amid the last gun control push, Democrats and their allies often touted the relative popularity of individual gun control proposals as measured by public opinion surveys, but they rarely noted that stricter gun laws was a relatively low priority for voters. By April of 2013, just 4 percent of Gallup poll respondents prioritized the passage of new gun control laws; more Americans valued “ethical/moral/family decline” as a pressing matter for the federal legislature to address than those who backed new gun laws.

But what speaks louder than polls are votes. For Democrats, there is little ambiguity about the negative impact a vote in favor of stricter gun laws can have on a political career. “Five of the Senate Democrats who voted in favor of the Manchin-Toomey amendment have since been replaced by NRA-endorsed Republicans,” the Washington Post’s Philip Bump recalled. Five months after that legislation failed to clear the Senate, two Colorado state legislators, including the state Senate president, were ousted by voters in a recall election triggered by the passage of a series of unpopular new gun control regulations. Even in the state that endured one of the worst mass shootings in the country’s history, voters remained disinclined to prioritize gun control legislation over gun owners’ rights.

There is little evidence that suggests this dynamic has changed today. In fact, the public’s antipathy toward stricter gun controls has only intensified. As of last December, for the first time in over 20 years of Pew Research Center surveys, that pollster found that a substantial majority of Americans were more supportive of the American right to own guns than controlling gun ownership. If history is any guide, the shooting in Oregon will temporarily increase the perception that new gun control laws are necessary, but public opinion will rapidly revert back to the mean.

There is a bizarre aversion among activists to calling politics what it is. Yes, the sincerest convictions of the average voter and activist alike can also have political dimensions, and those convictions can and often are exploited by politicians who may share their principles. But Republicans have it easy; they’re informed with galling regularity that their priorities are mere opportunities for their representatives to advance their career prospects. Grassroots Democrats have no such luck.