Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
I wonder if David Hogg listens to The Doors at all, because I’m getting a strong “Five to One” vibe from his latest stream-of-semi-consciousness tweets.
I mean honestly, is there much difference between Morrison singing “The old get old/And the young get stronger/May take a week/And it may take longer/They got the guns/Well, but we got the numbers/Gonna win, yeah/We’re takin’ over” and this hot take?
Jim Morrison penned his song in 1968, and honestly, it’s annoyed the crap out of me ever since I first heard it as a high schooler 20+ years later during the brief revival of The Doors’ popularity following the Oliver Stone biopic. The old do get old, but so do the young. Youth is fleeting, and in many cases, so too are the political stances we take when we’re young. When I was 18 I was a Bill Clinton-voting Democrat who rocked the vote and had no desire or interest in owning a gun. Five years later I was a married man, a dad to two kids, and was living in a pretty rough neighborhood compared to my solidly middle-class upbringing and time in a sleepy college town. All of a sudden personal safety and the safety of my loved ones was a concern in a way it hadn’t been just a few years earlier.
People change, in other words, and we often become more protective of our rights as we get older. Hogg is under the same false impression that Morrison was; demography is destiny, and the large number of young voters is going to transform the United States into a progressive paradise. Morrison wasn’t around (and Hogg wasn’t born) to see the hippies turn into Yuppies and elect Ronald Reagan to back-to-back terms, and Hogg’s not self-aware enough to realize that he’s regurgitating the same youth agit-prop that some of today’s aging Boomers were spouting off about 50 years ago.
David Hogg thinks time is on his side, but I’d argue that it’s actually his enemy. In fact, there’s already evidence that the generation that Hogg is pinning his hopes on is already drifting away from the support for gun control that surged after the mass murder at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. As the Washington Post and ABC News found in a poll conducted earlier this year, the greatest opposition to gun control at the moment is coming from those under the age of 30.
As noted, preference for new legislation is down 7 percentage points since last measured in April 2018. The decline is sharpest among 18 to 29-year-olds, from 65 percent to 45 percent; Hispanics, also down 20 points, to 50 percent; rural Americans, down 17 points to 30 percent; and strong conservatives, down 17 points to 11 percent.
In fact, while David Hogg is eagerly awaiting the die-off of the Boomers, he should be wishing them a long and healthy life, since the greatest support for gun control is currently found among those over the age of 65.
I’ll give Hogg and his fellow March for Our Lives co-founders for temporarily moving the needle on gun control among young voters in the months after the murders in Parkland, though I think equal credit should be given to the anti-gun media and celebrities who amplified their messaging. But as the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Institute for Politics revealed back in 2018, it was a surge in support for gun control. Now attitudes appear to be reverting back to historical norms.
A new national poll of America’s 18- to 29-year-olds by Harvard’s Institute of Politics (IOP), located at the Kennedy School of Government, finds 70 percent of young Americans likely to vote in the upcoming midterms believe that gun control laws in the United States should be more strict. Overall, 64 percent of 18-to 29-year-olds hold this view.
This finding represents a 15-point increase from polling conducted by the IOP in 2013, months after the Newtown, Connecticut school shooting when 49 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds supported stricter laws. One-in-ten (10%) 18-to 29-year-olds believe gun laws should be less strict today, while 22 percent think they should be kept the same as they are now.
Five years ago, 15 percent preferred that guns laws were less strict, while 36 percent favored keeping things the same. Increased levels of support for more stringent gun laws can be found among young Americans regardless of political affiliation: support increased 16 percentage points among Democrats (69% to 85%), 17 points among Republicans (20% to 37%) and 11 points among Independents (49% to 60%).
Public opinion is ever-changing, but generally speaking, this country is closely divided on whether it’s more important to protect or restrict the right to keep and bear arms. In 2013, 49% of those between the ages of 18 and 29 wanted more gun control. In 2021, it’s 45%. And I’d argue that over the next few years anyway, it’s not likely that Hogg is going to be happy with what the polling numbers show, because the left is becoming splintered in its views on gun control and gun ownership.
Take the Vermont AFL-CIO’s recent resolution supporting the right to keep and bear arms from a socialist perspective, or the defeat of a gun control bill in Nevada this year.
The provisions of SB452 were originally written into a larger gun bill that included the ban on ghost guns, or weapons that are generally home-assembled using component parts without serial numbers. The casino portions of the original bill were carved out, however, and placed in SB452, which was introduced as an emergency measure late in the session.
To no one’s surprise, the bill ran into opposition from Republican lawmakers, who raised concerns about Second Amendment infringement. Nothing new there — GOP legislators routinely reject gun-safety bills.
But what hadn’t been anticipated on the casino portion of the bill, and what would eventually derail the bill, is that it drew backlash from Democrats claiming it would lead to racial profiling and stop-and-frisk practices against minority casino patrons, particularly Blacks. Police unions also opposed it.
This was highly unusual, politically speaking: Groups that normally might have been at odds — such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Rifle Association and law enforcement union groups — found themselves aligned. Metro Police took a neutral stance.
“It covered the entire spectrum — left, right and center — who opposed this bill because of the potential outcomes,” Athar Haseebullah, executive director of the ACLU of Nevada, said in an interview with the Sun. “People didn’t take issue with the intentions but rather the probable outcomes.”
We’re seeing more people on the left who aren’t exactly pro-Second Amendment, but are anti-gun control because of their concerns over the disproportionate impact these laws have on minorities. A good example of this are the public defenders in New York who filed a brief with the Supreme Court arguing against the state’s concealed carry permitting laws. Most of these attorneys aren’t what you’d consider to be Second Amendment activists, but they see the harm done by putting thousands of Black men in prison for carrying a gun without a permit that the average citizen can’t obtain.
The gun control movement has largely tried to gloss over the fact that it is fundamentally powered by police enforcing their laws, in some cases going so far as to join other groups on the left in proclaiming that “police violence is gun violence.” Some progressive suckers might actually buy into the idea of that more gun control laws and less policing can successfully co-exist, but clearly there are some on the left who see the inherent contradiction, and I think those numbers are likely to grow larger over the next couple of years.
Who knows, maybe even Hogg himself will eventually realize that there’s nothing noble about trying to put people (a disproportionate number of them minorities) in prison for simply possessing a gun or a magazine that he doesn’t like. I kind of doubt it, but then again, these are strange days we’re living in.