Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Actually, this is only shocking to gun control advocates, who I’m sure are stunned that Americans aren’t responding to looting, riots, and skyrocketing violent crime by demanding a ban on scary black guns and waiting periods for gun purchases. For the rest of us, it probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise that as violent crime (including both politically-motivated violence and street crime) is on the upswing, Americans don’t find the idea of more gun control laws nearly as compelling as they did just a few months ago.
Rasmussen’s survey of 1,000 likely voters conducted on Aug. 5 had a margin of error of 3 percentage points and showed 52% still support stricter gun regulations, but that was down from 64% in 2019. Forty-two percent oppose stricter gun regulations.
The poll also showed that 47% of those questioned own a gun or had someone in their household that did. Among those households, 27% said they or someone in the home has purchased a firearm in the past six months.
That last bit is worth noting. We know for a fact that a record number of firearms have been sold every month since March of this year, and the National Shooting Sports Foundation estimates that two million Americans have purchased a gun for the first time between January and June of this year. The Rasmussen poll didn’t ask specifically how many of those who had purchased a firearm in the past six months were new gun owners, but with support for gun control dropping by 12-points in the past year, it stands to reason that a healthy number of respondents are relatively new to exercising their Second Amendment rights.
Given the poll’s margin of error, support for gun control could actually be well below 50%, and with violence continuing to escalate, I suspect that gun control’s popularity will continue to crater. In Democrat-controlled cities across the country, the Left is showing us their vision for the future: fewer police and more violence. Is it any wonder that more Americans are responding by choosing to protect themselves and their loved ones with a firearm? Absolutely not. Maybe the really shocking thing about this poll is that gun control still managed to get the approval of 52% of likely voters.
I don’t think it’s going to be that high come Election Day, and that will pose increasing problems for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, who are running as the most anti-gun ticket in American history. They’re campaigning on a platform that would turn the right of the people to keep and bear arms into a privilege for a chosen few, and they’re doing so at a time of record-setting gun sales and plummeting support for more gun laws. Their anti-gun agenda may be bringing in big bucks from the likes of Michael Bloomberg, but as we get closer to November it’s likely to turn off more and more voters, and not just on the Right.
Gun control laws create gun crimes out of thin air, and at a time when the Left is demanding defunding law enforcement and “re-imagining” policing, the Biden/Harris campaign is going old school; more gun control laws and a strategy that amounts to arresting our way to safety through enforcement of those new laws. That’s antithetical to the ideology of Black Lives Matter, but it’s a fundamental part of the Democrats’ platform. The more Joe Biden and Kamala Harris talk up their “common sense gun safety” agenda, gun owners need to be reminding voters of the real world consequences of those laws.
Even if you despise guns with every fiber of your being, you should know that enactment of the Biden/Harris gun control agenda means far more young black men in big cities will arrested for violating an “assault weapons ban” or possessing a “large capacity magazine” than 40-something rural white guys like me. Old school gun control is in direct conflict with the ideas of de-policing, and conservative gun owners aren’t the only ones who should be opposed to the regressive and repressive agenda of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Cam Edwards has covered the 2nd Amendment for more than 15 years as a broadcast and online journalist, as well as the co-author of "Heavy Lifting: Grow Up, Get a Job, Start a Family, and Other Manly Advice" with Jim Geraghty. He lives outside of Farmville, Virginia with his family. https://bearingarms.com/author/camedwards/
https://bearingarms.com/cam-e/2020/08/13/poll-support-gun-control-plummets/