In the Times interesting profile on the demise of the gun control legislation following Newtown is this chestnut.

 At roughly the same time that Franken and other Democratic senators were plotting their legislative strategy, their Democratic counterparts in the House met for an annual retreat in Leesburg, Va. Among the gathering’s main events was a seminar on how to talk to voters about firearms and gun legislation. But not one of the four panelists — a Yale law professor, a political reporter, a former Orlando police chief who ran for Congress on the Democratic ticket and the veteran Beltway strategist Anita Dunn — could claim a true appreciation of American gun culture. According to two attendees, when Dunn was describing the desirability of background checks, she used the word “registration” — thereby conjuring up the specter of a national registry of all licensed guns, a notion that is abhorrent to many gun owners, who fear that registering firearms with a federal agency would make it easier for the government to one day confiscate them. “She kept using the R-word,” one attendee recalls. “And what I took away was that nobody in the Democratic Party knows how to talk about this.”

So what Yale LawProf was invited to such a shindig to talk about gun control?