Support for gun control has declined over the past three years.
After 2020, I’m much more wary about polling than I used to be. Pollsters assured us and insisted that they had accounted for “shy Trump voters” or shy GOP voters or working-class whites who were less likely to talk to a stranger on the phone or all kinds of factors, so they wouldn’t have a rerun of 2016. And then last year, despite all those assurances, the majority of pollsters consistently overestimated Democratic performance at the ballot box all over again — particularly egregiously in Senate races in Maine and South Carolina. Earlier this month, five major Democratic pollsters conducted a review and concluded they “saw major errors and failed to live up to our own expectations.” The American Association for Public Opinion Research is conducting a similar review, trying to figure out just what went wrong.
Thus, when a story like this pops up in the Washington Post . . .
The Post-ABC poll finds 50 percent of Americans support enacting new laws to reduce gun violence, down from a peak of 57 percent after the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. Just over 4 in 10, 43 percent, of Americans say protecting the right to own guns should be a bigger priority, up from 34 percent in 2018.
. . . on paper, it’s good news for those who support the Second Amendment. On the other hand, how much should we make of a seven-point shift over three years? Or is it that polling consistently over-samples Democrats and those whose politics lean to the left, so gun control is even less popular than it appears?
Maybe a better question to ask in light of these numbers is, what’s happened since spring 2018 on the issue of guns and gun rights?
- The National Rifle Association became consumed by bitter infighting and ugly accusations, declared bankruptcy, and spent about half as much as it did on political campaigns and elections in 2020 as it did in 2016.
- Horrifying high-profile mass shootings continued to plague the nation, with particularly appalling shootings in Thousand Oaks, Pittsburgh, Santa Fe, El Paso, Dayton, Virginia Beach and Odessa, Texas, and more recently, Boulder and Indianapolis.
- The more pro-gun of the two national parties, the Republicans, lost the presidency and control of the Senate, and have suffered from their own intense internal divisions and rivalries.
- Leaders of corporate America have become much more outspoken about political issues, and almost entirely in support of the Democratic Party and its priorities.
On paper, for advocates of gun control, by a lot of measures, this is about as perfect a set of circumstances as they could want. Oh, but there’s one other key trend at work:
- In 2020, gun sales in the U.S. increased by 40 percent, more than 5 million people bought a gun for the first time last year, and this January, more than 4.1 million guns were sold.
Despite just about every major cultural force attempting to argue that gun ownership is dangerous, pernicious, and an outdated relic of the Constitution that cannot fit in modern society, lots more Americans have purchased guns in the past three years. (That’s a key point of counterevidence to the notion that cultural elites “control” society. They may want to control society, and try to control society, but at some point, people will just refuse to do what they don’t want to do. It’s like the old joke about why a company’s extensive and elaborate efforts to revamp the marketing of a brand of dog food failed: “The dogs don’t like it.”)
But going back to that first list of changes since 2018, after all that . . . gun control is actually less popular now than it was three years ago? And support for protecting gun-owners’ rights has actually increased?
To the extent we can trust current polling . . . yeesh. If Democrats can’t galvanize public pressure to pass a big gun-control bill in these circumstances, when is it ever going to happen?