Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
"Americans Remain Largely Dissatisfied With U.S. Gun Laws," a Friday report by the Gallup polling firm announced. “Fifty-six percent of Americans say they are dissatisfied with U.S. gun laws and policies, marking the ninth consecutive year of majority-level dissatisfaction since the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. At the same time, 42% of U.S. adults express satisfaction with U.S. gun laws.”
Left unsaid, although they have the information because they compiled it and linked to it, is that there is a 0% change in overall respondent attitudes since the last poll in 2020. No matter, since it’s all meaningless anyway, but presented to advance Gallup’s admitted goal of providing “global analytics and advice [to help] leaders and organizations solve their most pressing problems.”
Argue with their methodology [download] if you like, that’s not what’s important here. I’m perfectly willing to stipulate those are the numbers yielded from their sample size, and the way they are “weighted to correct for unequal selection probability, non-response, double coverage of landline and cell users … to match the national demographics of gender, age, race, Hispanic ethnicity, education, region, population density, and phone status.” I will say I’ve been around awhile and have never met a right to keep and bear arms advocate who has ever participated in one of these polls, but that’s not the deal killer for me, either.
Neither are results showing differences between Democrats and Republicans. You’d expect more of the former to want more “laws,” and the latter would be OK keeping things the way they are. It is disappointing, but not unexpected, that the numbers wanting fewer laws are so low, but that gets to the crux on what’s NOT being asked.
In all the hubbub about “do you want more, do you want less, is it too hot, too cold, too hard, too soft, just right?” (and let me just segue off into a wholly-unrelated “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” story for a moment), there’s one question that is glaringly absent:
“Just how much do you know about gun laws in the first damn place?”
That could then be drilled down into subsets like “Do you even know what an ‘assault weapon’ is and what the gun-grabbers and their media mouthpieces want you to believe?” or “If ‘universal background checks’ work, what the hell is going on in Baltimore?” That and “Explain ‘due process’ and how ‘red flag laws’ could possibly provide it,” or “Produce one citation from the time the Constitution was being debated to show the Founders did not intend for the citizenry to have ‘weapons of war’ when they ratified the Second Amendment.”
We could do this all day, but the point is made. It doesn’t seem to occur to the survey wonks that a meaningful opinion sounding of Americans who have taken time to inform themselves already exists in the form of gun sales going through the roof.
The reason politicians “rely” on such polls like this latest bit of Gallup nonsense is to ascertain how successful they’ve been in swindling the ignorant out of their rights, and to determine what could work to further spook the herd.
There’s an old saying we’ve all heard, at times attributed to Mark Twain, at times to 19th Century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, at times to others:
“There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
The gun-grabbers who use such surveys to advance their citizen disarmament agenda are skilled in all three.