Polls say Americans’ overall support for gun control is tepid
Despite what you may be hearing on CNN and MSNBC or other left-leaning news organizations, recent polls indicate that Americans’ support for more gun control legislation nationally has been falling, has rarely topped 60%, and lately has dipped to 52%. I’ll list the polls at the end of this post—three by Pew Research and two by Gallup. These polls were taken before the recent mass shootings in Buffalo, NY, and Uvalde, TX. As in the past there will now surely be a surge in support for more and more effective gun controls—but if the past is any guide, the surge will subside and in a few months support for gun controls will flatten out again. Although a slight gain in support for more gun restrictions might occur, it can hardly be decisive legally due to our political paralysis.
What’s missing in most of these polls is a comparative breakdown by state and region. Does high public support for stricter gun laws correlate with lower rates of shooting deaths? Hard to tell. There’s a lot of data on gun deaths and shootings by state and region, but when it comes to public support for stricter gun laws the data are either missing or confusing. One obstacle to doing so is that there is no one single metric by which to rank “support” because what gun control means in one location is different from what it means in another location: background checks, age requirements, license requirements, training requirements, red flag laws (and their level of enforcement), properties of the firearms themselves (e.g. semiautomatic vs fully automatic, rate of fire, accuracy, ammunition, size of magazines, etc.), can all be mixed in proportions that are not standardized.
Nevertheless, an attempt was made by “World Population Review” in which there is a table (scroll down to “Strictest Gun Laws by State”) comparing “Strictness Grade” and gun death rates, and using a single number to represent a group of measures that vary from state to state. In general, the states with the strictest gun laws have the lowest gun death rates. Sure, say the liberals, duh. But that’s not the point, say Second Amendment zealots. The pro-gun counterargument is, that states with the strictest gun laws are the least “free.” Murders and suicides by guns are as Bill O’Reilly once said, “the cost of freedom.”
Continue reading “Gun Violence: Facts, Alternative Facts, and Frightening Facts”