In the immortal words of George Benson, the children are our future. The older crowd will inevitably die off, and the kids who are growing up now will inevitably replace them in everything from politics to butcher shops. In terms of firearms, it seems the reports of the death of American gun ownership have been greatly exaggerated. According to a new poll from American University, 60 percent of young people growing up today want to buy a gun . . .
Despite experiencing a post-Columbine world, 60 percent of high school and college students are considering owning a gun in the future, according to a national poll.
One-third of young people reported growing up with a gun in the household and 36 percent reported being “very worried” about gun violence. However, nearly 40 percent of participants planned to own a gun when they have their own household, and an additional 20 percent were contemplating it.
There are two things driving this. First and foremost, Call of Duty and its competitors are the best recruiting tools the firearms industry has ever had. I’ll freely admit it — video games got me to my first rifle club meeting in college. It was the gateway drug to the world of guns in which I’ve become fully immersed. And with the increased popularity of those games, I have no doubt that more people are becoming interested in the same way.
The poll bears this out, with the following as one of the key findings:
High school students who regularly play video games for more than 4 hours per day are 50 percent more likely than those who do not typically play video games to report plans to own a gun. The results are similar among college students.
BAM! Proof. Kinda.
The second thing driving this: we’re returning to the normal, natural percentage of people who enjoy guns.
We’re seeing the Kennedy generation becoming less influential; an entire generation of people with the indelible childhood memory of seeing JFK’s assassination and immediately associating guns with people being sad. It’s an emotional response that is extremely difficult to get over and the fewer people who remember it, the more guns return to being the normal, everyday objects they are.
Emotion versus logic is the current fight we’re waging. And the fewer people who have a hard and fast emotional response, the more we can win people over with logic.