From Gallup: “Americans’ support for a ban on semi-automatic guns in the U.S. has dropped eight percentage points from a year ago, when opinions were more evenly divided after the mass shooting in Las Vegas. Last year’s measure was unusually high for the trend over the past several years; the current 40% is back to within a few points of where it was between 2011 and 2016.”
And it’s not even close…the gap between pro and against is now a whopping 17 percent.
So despite the opportunistic onslaught from the Civilian Disarmament Industrial Complex and their willing co-conspirators in the media in the aftermath of two national attention-grabbing incidents, Americans have decided that knee-jerk reactions that result in an abrogation of their civil rights isn’t in their best interests.
Gun grabbers know — better than most — that you never let a crisis go to waste. Which is why we now have a number of states with bump stock bans and age limits to buy long guns. Given time, the electorate comes to its collective senses and that works against the interests of those who would degrade our right to keep and bear arms.
Surprising precisely no one…
Views of an assault weapons ban are sharply polarized politically. Since 1996, Democrats have been more supportive than Republicans of a ban on semi-automatic guns. Currently, they are more than twice as likely as Republicans to favor such a ban (56% vs. 25%). Republicans’ current reading ties with 2016 as their lowest. Thirty-eight percent of independents support a ban, continuing the recent trend in which they are more closely aligned with Republicans than with Democrats.
The highest support for a ban among each party was 50% of Republicans in 1996, 63% of Democrats in 1996, 2000 and 2017, and 63% of independents in 2000.
So Beto Bobby O’Rourke, Claire McCaskill and Diane Feinstein aren’t likely to have views altered by Gallup’s results. We suppose America’s gun owners are OK with that.