As we get into the meat of the campaign season, even if it looks little like we expected it to look just a few weeks ago, guns are going to become a significant issue. Why? Vice President Kamala Harris and her allies in the media are likely to try to make it one.
We know where she stands on the issue, obviously, and we know where Trump stands.
But that’s not really the important point, now is it? What matters is really where the American people stand. If gun control is to be an issue in the campaign, what do the voters think of guns, gun control, and the right to keep and bear arms?
Well, Pew published a piece that tries to answer that question.
Guns are deeply ingrained in American society and the nation’s political debates.
The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees the right to bear arms, and about a third of U.S. adults say they personally own a gun. At the same time, in response to concerns such as rising gun death rates and mass shootings, the U.S. surgeon general has taken the unprecedented step of declaring gun violence a public health crisis.
Here are some key findings about Americans’ views of gun ownership, gun policy and other subjects, drawn from Pew Research Center surveys.
…
A majority of Americans (61%) say it is too easy to legally obtain a gun in this country, according to the June 2023 survey. Far fewer (9%) say it is too hard, while another 30% say it’s about right.
Non-gun owners are nearly twice as likely as gun owners to say it is too easy to legally obtain a gun (73% vs. 38%). Gun owners, in turn, are more than twice as likely as nonowners to say the ease of obtaining a gun is about right (48% vs. 20%).
There are differences by party and community type on this question, too. While 86% of Democrats say it is too easy to obtain a gun legally, far fewer Republicans (34%) say the same. Most urban (72%) and suburban (63%) residents say it’s too easy to legally obtain a gun, but rural residents are more divided: 47% say it is too easy, 41% say it is about right and 11% say it is too hard.
About six-in-ten U.S. adults (58%) favor stricter gun laws. Another 26% say that U.S. gun laws are about right, while 15% favor less strict gun laws.
Well, that doesn’t bode well for gun rights supporters, now does it?
Don’t get too twisted just yet, because, in an expandable section near the top of the piece, we learn that the survey in question was conducted in June of last year, meaning these results may or may not have any bearing at all on how anyone feels about the right to keep and bear arms.
Further, they don’t actually do much to see how important this issue is to people’s voting habits.
For example, there are liberal gun owners. They have a whole organization full of them. These are people who stand with the Democratic Party on the vast majority of issues, except for gun control as a whole. Yet many of those folks still vote for Democrats. For them, there are other issues that matter, so their support for the right to keep and bear arms isn’t enough to make them vote for a pro-gun candidate.
On the flip side, there are a number of Republican-leaning voters who do want gun control. They just want cheap groceries more right now, so no matter what Harris says on the issue of guns, it’s not going to matter to them.
Pew didn’t bother to ask, not that it would matter considering their latest research is over a year old. It’s almost like they’re afraid to ask the question because they might not like the answer.
It should also be remembered that different polls find different things, often based on something as simple as how they ask the question. Pew routinely finds massive support for gun control, yet we don’t see a lot of evidence of that swaying elections, so I’m inclined to argue that despite asking questions, Pew hasn’t got a freaking clue what the American people really think.
