A fresh Rasmussen survey suggests the public still isn’t buying the argument that more gun control means less crime. Most likely voters say the fix is already on the books and just needs to be enforced — and the numbers land at a pivotal moment, with the Supreme Court set to decide whether states can ban the very rifles a majority of Democratic voters say they’d like to see outlawed.
The Numbers
By Rasmussen’s tally, 52 percent of voters believe stricter enforcement of existing laws would do more to cut violent crime involving firearms — up two points from last September — while just 34 percent think passing new laws would work better.
The survey also captures a partisan gulf that will surprise no one who’s followed the debate. Rasmussen found 79 percent of Democrats want stricter gun control laws, compared to only 29 percent of Republicans. And on rifles specifically, 65 percent of Democrats said they’d vote for a congressional candidate who promised to completely ban modern semi-automatic rifles.
That last figure is the one worth sitting with, because those rifles are no longer just a campaign talking point. They’re the subject of the biggest Second Amendment case in a generation.
The Cases Behind the Numbers
On June 30 — the final day of its last term — the Supreme Court granted certiorari in two challenges to “assault weapons” bans and consolidated them for a single argument: Viramontes v. Cook County, out of Illinois, and Grant v. Higgins, out of Connecticut. Both were brought by the Second Amendment Foundation — the sister organization of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms — and both put state and local bans on commonly owned semi-automatic rifles squarely before the justices.
It’s the first time the Court has agreed to decide the AR-15 question head-on, and the first rifle-ban cases it’s taken since it turned away Snope v. Brown in 2025. The cases will be heard in the term that opens in October, with oral arguments expected in the fall or winter and a decision likely by the end of June 2027. Whatever the polls say, in other words, the fate of “assault weapons” bans in Illinois, Connecticut, California, New York, Maryland, and every other ban state now rides on how the justices answer a single question: whether the Second Amendment protects the best-selling rifle in America.
Rights Aren’t a Popularity Contest
CCRKBA chairman Alan Gottlieb — whose sister organization, the Second Amendment Foundation, is behind both cases — called the timing telling, with the midterms roughly ten weeks out and the Court’s term about to begin. He argued the survey hands voters a clear look at where candidates stand, but was careful to draw the line that matters most.
“Constitutionally-protected fundamental rights are not now, and never should be, subject to the results of public opinion polls,” Gottlieb said, adding that “recent Supreme Court rulings make it clear the Second Amendment is not a second-class right.”
That’s the crux of it. The Rasmussen numbers are a useful snapshot of where the public sits — trending, on balance, toward enforcement over prohibition. But a majority of one party’s voters wanting to ban a commonly owned rifle is exactly the scenario the Bill of Rights exists to check. Come next summer, nine justices, not the polling averages, will decide whether that rifle stays legal.
The latest National Firearms Survey is out – among that covered …a lot more AR’s out there than thought, 2.2 million DGU’s a year, some great numbers on firearms, Mark Smith discusses…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBBUpZ-x_d0
2026 National Firearms Survey: Results from the Second Wave, Including Current Ownership of AR-15 Style Rifles, Other “Assault Weapons,” and Magazines that Hold More than 10 Rounds [ note: covers a lot more, including defensive gun use]
“Abstract
This report summarizes the findings of the second wave of the National Firearms Survey, a national survey of firearms ownership and use conducted in July and August of 2026. The survey was administered online to a representative sample of 51,398 U.S. residents aged 18 and over, and it identified 16,688 internally validated gun owners who answered in-depth questions concerning their ownership and use of firearms, including questions about using a firearm in self-defense. The second wave incorporates a series of methodological refinements that respond directly to scholarly discussion of the first (2021) wave: ownership questions specify individual rather than household or spousal ownership; questions about magazines and “assault weapons” ask about current rather than past ownership; AR-15 type rifles and other similarly styled semi-automatic rifles are asked about separately; respondents who report defensive gun uses are asked the approximate age at which each incident occurred and whether the defensive use succeeded in averting a crime (or was directed against an animal threat); and, as a two-stage data-integrity check, respondents are counted as gun owners only if they both indicated firearm ownership on a screening question and subsequently reported owning a positive number of rifles, shotguns, or handguns in a detailed count of firearm types that required a response. In addition, the analyzed sample reflects standard quality-control checks, including an embedded attention check and the removal of responses with low reCAPTCHA scores and suspected duplicate responses.
With raked weighting on gender, age, race, and state of residence, using targets from the 2024 American Community Survey, the survey finds that 32.7% of U.S. adults (95% CI 32.2% – 33.2%) personally own firearms, suggesting that approximately 88 million American adults own guns. Following the practice of major survey programs such as the General Social Survey, Gallup, and Pew’s American Trends Panel, household income is not employed as a weighting dimension. However, income-raked estimates, which range up to 34.9%, are reported as robustness exercises in an appendix. Ownership is demographically diverse: 45.7% of validated gun owners are female, 25.6% do not identify as White (alone), and the gap in ownership rates between White Americans (34.6%) and Black Americans (33.0%) has narrowed to less than two percentage points. The survey finds that 37.6% of gun owners have used a firearm to defend themselves, their property, a family member, or a member of their household, and it estimates that guns are used defensively by firearms owners in approximately 2.2 million incidents per year. In most defensive incidents no shot was fired (76.3%), about half (50.8%) involved more than one assailant, and in 70.6% of incidents respondents report that the defensive use was successful, such that no crime remained to be reported to the police. 8.4% of defensive incidents were directed against animal threats rather than criminal threats. Separate from these self-defense incidents, 34.7% of gun owners reported that the mere presence of a gun has deterred criminal conduct.
A majority of gun owners (70.0%) indicate that there are some circumstances in which they carry a handgun for self-defense. We estimate that approximately 33.6 million gun owners (39.3% of those aged 21 and over) are “public carriers” who are permitted to carry and carry at least sometimes. The average gun owner owns about 5.2 firearms, and handguns are the most common type of firearm owned (91.6% of owners). 50.5% of gun owners – approximately 44.5 million adults – report that they currently own magazines that hold more than 10 rounds (approximately 539 million such magazines in total), and 88.0% of these owners cite a defensive purpose for owning them. 25.0% of gun owners currently own an AR-15 type rifle, 12.9% currently own other similarly styled semi-automatic rifles, and 30.0% – approximately 26.4 million adults – currently own at least one firearm in one of these two categories, with approximately 40 million AR-15 type rifles and 20 million other similarly styled rifles owned in total. Overall, Americans own approximately 461 million firearms, consisting of approximately 208 million handguns, 154 million rifles, and 99 million shotguns.
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[note: download the PDF from the link to read the whole thing]
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7347338