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Poll Finds Disagreement On “Gun Violence,” Gun Ownership

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Liberals and conservatives disagree on plenty. I mean, that’s kind of why there are two opposite ends of the spectrum. It’s because they’re polar opposites.

Most people, to be fair, live in the middle somewhere. They can agree on a few issues here or there. One of those issues you’d think they’d agree on is whether “gun violence” is a problem or not, but you’d be wrong.

Attitudes about gun violence differ widely by race, ethnicity, political party and community type, according to Pew Research Center research. While 73% of Democrats see gun violence as a big problem, only 18% of Republicans see it as a problem. When broken down further, it was shown that Black Democrats are more likely than white, Hispanic Democrats to say gun violence is a big problem.

In total, around half of all Americans (48%) see gun violence as a problem in the country, according to Pew.

And, honestly, both have a point. Homicides are up, which justifies Democrats’ view that “gun violence” is an issue. Republicans, on the other hand, tend to reject the term “gun violence” altogether. Why wouldn’t they? Is violence somehow worse because a gun is used rather than, say, a knife or a bat?

Not really.

In addition, it should be noted that while homicides are up, other violent crimes aren’t really following the same trends.

However, Pew also had questions about gun ownership.

Personal protection tops the list of reasons why gun owners say they own a firearm. The Pew Research Center also found that four in 10 U.S. adults live in a household with a gun, including 30% who say they own one. Gun ownership is closely linked with views on gun policies, which is true even among gun owners and nongun owners within the same political party, according to one Pew survey.

Some 44% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say they own a gun, while only 20% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning persons say they own one, Pew research shows. Republican gun owners are least supportive of policies restricting access to guns while Democratic who don’t own guns are most supportive.

Of course, those numbers are based on people who admit to having a gun. A lot of people won’t tell pollsters whether they have one or not, mostly because no one seems to trust them not to have some way to tie answers to phone numbers or whatever. Either way, I know a lot of gun owners who outright lie about whether a gun is in the house or not, so those numbers may well be higher.

Unsurprisingly, though, they do find a link between gun ownership and views on gun policy. We’ve figured that to be true for years, which is why the surge in gun buying is such good news for gun owners overall. More new gun owners will eventually lead to more new gun voters.

The fact that liberals seem to believe “gun violence” is a significant issue, however, may well mean that more of them will start buying guns and, in time, change their views on the Second Amendment. If enough of that happens, maybe the Democrats will stop trying to take our guns, especially if it’s their base they’re talking about disarming.

POLITICO Touts Pro-Biden Poll Without Actually Linking to It

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In a piece declaring that Joe Biden is winning the war on Afghanistan messaging, POLITICO explains that those polled recently support America being out of Afghanistan more than they support remaining in Afghanistan. Which is actually probably accurate and there is no reason to doubt that those polled feel that way.

The problem, however, is twofold:

  1. That is a dishonest framing of the Afghanistan situation
  2. They provide no link to the poll itself.

Via the POLITICO piece:

FIRST IN NATSEC DAILY — The Biden administration’s messaging on Afghanistan is working, new polling seen exclusively by NatSec Daily shows — a boon to Secretary of State ANTONY BLINKEN and Defense Secretary LLOYD AUSTIN as they head into congressional hearings on the chaotic withdrawal.

The C|T Group, an international consulting firm, sent one-sentence arguments to people in the United States, Britain and Australia, both in favor of and against President JOE BIDEN’s pullout decision. They found that pro-withdrawal lines drove more people to support leaving Afghanistan, whereas statements that backed remaining in the country weren’t as convincing.

The poll was seen “exclusively” by the writers of this newsletter, and that in itself raises some issues. Why is it not released widely? Given the disastrous polling of the last few election cycles, transparency in polling is more vital than ever. That the poll appears to have been shopped around does not lend much credibility.

Moreover, the description is a bit strange. It appears that several lines were randomly sent out to respondents, but we don’t know what questions they were asked about the lines or how the lines were delivered. We also don’t know if everyone got one line or multiple lines, whether or not the respondents were asked to rank them or just approve or disapprove. They don’t even give percentages of approval or disapproval. This story tells us absolutely nothing at all.

The giveaway here is the following section:

About 33 percent of Britons and 32 percent of Aussies say China will be the world’s most influential country in 10 years. Only 18 percent and 21 percent from those two countries, respectively, believe the most powerful nation will be the United States. Among Americans, though, 34 percent say the United States will stay on top, while 21 percent say China will surpass it.

They will give percentages for other countries’ respondents and still not say what Americans think on the subject. This clearly seems like a mix of bad polling and bad reporting. If someone handed this poll to me and this was the only information I had, I wouldn’t write the story because it tells me nothing. If the polling firm did tell POLITICO the details and they excluded it, all of these writers deserve to be punished for leaving so many holes in the reporting.

Does the polling really favor President Biden?
AP Photo/Evan Vucci

The other problem, as I mentioned earlier, is that this poll completely misframes the situation. The problem with Afghanistan is not whether or not we should still be there.

The problem with Afghanistan is the withdrawal being an utter, directionless disaster. There appears to have been no plan, we have potentially thousands of Americans still stuck in the country, and there is seemingly no desire to get them out (though we will give the Taliban millions of dollars in aid).

It’s not a question of whether or not we should still be there, whether or not we should be propping up a failed regime, or whether or not the war was worth fighting. The question is “Did we screw up?” and the answer is a resounding yes.

But if that question gets asked right now, the public polling may still be on Biden’s side. The media has largely moved on in an effort to protect the President and because of their own boredom with the issue. They have no interest in really covering the withdrawal itself, but they will point to bad polling and say “See? This is proof we should be out of there!”

Except, we aren’t out of there. Our military is, but not our people. If you ask folks like these reporters at POLITICO, though, that doesn’t appear to matter.

Joe Biden Just Had His Worst 24-Hours of Polling and There's No End in Sight

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Joe Biden’s presidency is collapsing. That’s been my supposition for the last several weeks of chaos most starkly illustrated by what happened in Afghanistan, where Americans still remain abandoned and 13 US service members were murdered.

It’s not just foreign policy, though. Inflation woes have only worsened while COVID deaths are now higher today than they were at this time last year when Donald Trump was president.

We were promised a return of competency, normalcy, and an end to the pandemic. What we got was the current mix of ineptitude, predictable as it may have been given the Washington establishment’s prior track record.

Now, we are starting to get consistent data points showing that the supposition regarding all that turmoil and failure has become reality. Biden’s presidency is indeed collapsing, and unlike the Taliban’s foreseeable advance in Afghanistan, it’s happening far quicker than anyone could have predicted.

Here’s Biden’s polling situation in just the last 24-hours.

Biden also dropped to just 44% approval in the latest ABC News/The Washington Post poll. That makes four polls showing him at 46% or below in just the last day.

Where does Biden do the worst? Obviously, Afghanistan is a huge drag on him right now, with an overwhelming majority disapproving of his handling of the withdrawal in all these polls. But it’s his former firewall of COVID approval that may be the most consequential. Whereas he used to consistently remain above water specifically because of his handling of COVID, he’s now falling below 50% on that point fairly often now. Add in the fact that most blame him for the current inflation that’s nailing the middle-class and you get an idea of how his overall approval has tanked so much.

So where does Biden go from here? I don’t think he goes anywhere. There’s no reason to believe there’s an end in sight to his downfall. When a president drops into the mid-low 40s in approval, they typically languish. Remember, this is a president with no natural base outside of possibly African-Americans. Many of the people that voted for him did it as a compromise because they didn’t like Donald Trump. They have little reason to stick around now, and history says presidential approval has a major impact on the mid-terms.

I think Biden’s implosion doesn’t just impact him, but it sets up the Democrats for an absolute beating in 2022. A red wave was already probable, but it’s quickly reaching imminent territory.

Polling On Afghanistan Should Give Biden Second Thoughts About His Gun Ban Plans

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On the surface, there might not be much of a link between Joe Biden’s catastrophic ineptitude with the pullout of troops from Afghanistan and the president’s desire to ban tens of millions of commonly owned firearms (besides the sight of Taliban troops going door-to-door taking guns from civilians), but on today’s Bearing Arms’ Cam & Co we’re delving into some recent polling numbers for Biden’s Afghanistan policy and why those figures should be sounding alarm bells in the White House about the administration’s gun ban plans.

According to two new polls, public support for Biden’s pullout is cratering, with even a plurality of Democrats now saying it’s a mistake to leave Afghanistan if it leads to a Taliban takeover or a safe haven for Al-Qaeda. As HotAir’s Allahpundit succinctly puts it:

Biden may be a victim of his own bullsh*t. He and Tony Blinken assured the public that Afghanistan was at no risk of imminent collapse. Americans may have believed him. Combine that with their general inattention to foreign affairs and the public may have imagined that the country would stand on its own, at least for awhile, after we had left.

Or maybe they’re just fickle and myopic. They liked the idea of withdrawal when they didn’t have to think about the inevitable consequences, and now that they do have to think about them they don’t like it anymore. Oops.

Either way, we may need to revisit the assumption based on months of polling that Americans strongly support withdrawal. Once you remind them that that comes with a price, the numbers change.

We see the same phenomenon when it comes to public polling on gun control. How many polls have you seen showing 80 or 90% approval for something like universal background checks? According to gun control activists, you’d be hard-pressed to find an American who wasn’t on board with the idea, and yet when universal background checks were put before voters in Nevada and Maine five years ago, they didn’t garner anywhere close to 80% of the vote.

In fact, in Nevada the background check measure passed with just 50.4% of the vote. In Maine the background check referendum did even worse, garnering approval of just 48% of voters. These were supposed to be slam dunks for the gun control lobby, yet they came within 10,000 votes of losing in both states. What happened?

Voters started paying attention. They started thinking about how these would-be laws would be enforced, and many of them realized that while commercial sales of firearms already require background checks, the proposed laws could turn family and friends into criminals for simply loaning or selling a gun to a neighbor without first putting them through a background check. They wondered how these laws could actually prevent a criminal from illegally obtaining a firearm, and gun control activists didn’t have a good answer. And suddenly, a measure that was supposedly incredibly popular turned out to be incredibly divisive instead.

We’re likely to see the same thing if and when Biden moves forward with some of his gun ban plans. It’s one thing for non-gun owners to think that big scary rifles like the AR-15 should be banned, but how many of them have considered what enforcement of that ban would actually entail? I’ve yet to see a poll on banning “assault weapons” that discusses how such a law would be enforced or what the criminal penalty would be, but it stands to reason that the more the public learns about the implementation of Biden’s gun ban, the less popular it will become.

And frankly, support for Biden’s gun ban doesn’t poll nearly as well as universal background checks. According to an April poll by Pew Research, 81% of respondents backed a universal background check law, but support for a ban on so-called assault weapons was far lower at 63%. My guess is that most of those respondents have no idea about the gritty details of Biden’s gun ban proposal, which include making it a federal felony offense punishable by ten years in prison for simply maintaining possession of a gun that was legally purchased (unless it was first registered with the government under the National Firearms Act). If they did learn those details, my suspicion is that there would be far fewer Americans in favor of criminalizing the most commonly sold rifle in the United States.

As long as Biden’s gun control agenda is largely dormant, Americans won’t pay much attention to the devil in the details. With the administration set to impose new restrictions on home-built firearms and pistols with stabilizing braces via executive action, however, Joe Biden seems intent on forging ahead with his gun ban plans, and he’s already shown us that he’s fine with putting rules in place that even when his own advisors warn him that his efforts are likely unconstitutional.

Most politicians would realize that now’s probably not a great time to attempt a gun ban via executive action, but I don’t think Biden’s going to learn that lesson. Not only is he as committed to his gun control agenda as he is pulling out of Afghanistan, but with a growing number of Democrats now criticizing the president for the crisis in Kabul, Biden is likely to look for allies wherever he can find them, and the gun control lobby has so far been willing to stand by his side for the most part (despite some grumbling from a few activists over the White House’s efforts to confirm David Chipman as ATF director). I think it would be a political miscalculation as well as an affront to the Constitution for Biden to lean in to his gun control agenda, but as we’ve seen during his short time in office, if there’s one thing that Biden’s good at, it’s making the wrong decision.

Poll Finds Support For Missouri's Second Amendment Preservation Act In Surprising Places

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The Second Amendment Preservation act is pretty controversial. After all, a state announcing they weren’t going to enforce any federal gun control laws within their borders is one of those things that won’t sit well with many folks.

What really matters as far as Missouri’s lawmakers are concerned is whether it can withstand a court challenge–which it may well do–and how do the voters feel about it.

In Missouri, a recent poll found that the measure is popular enough.

Gov. Parson recently signed the “Second Amendment Preservation Act,” allowing state and local officers to be sued if they try to enforce federal gun laws. The controversial measure led Philip Dupuis to resign as chief of police in O’Fallon. Fifty-two percent of Missouri voters support the state law, and 38% oppose the law (margin of error ± 5.8%). More than 59% of Republicans and Independents support the law, but only 16% of Democratic voters support the law.

Honestly, I’m surprised 16 percent of Democrats support it. That’s kind of baffling to me, but I’ll take it.

What’s interesting, though, is when you dig a little deeper into the numbers. It seems much of the support for the bill is coming from some rather surprising places.

First, on the matter of race. Among black voters, 39 percent support the law and another 19 percent aren’t sure. That leaves 42 percent opposed. With a difference of 3 percent, that’s within the poll’s margin of error of 5.81 percent.

Among non-whites in general, though, the support is even stronger. There, 48 percent support the law as opposed to 35 percent who oppose it and 17 percent who have no opinion.

Ah, but young voters. That’s where anti-Second Amendment groups have been putting their focus since Parkland. Surely they’re all kind of upset over this bill, right? Right?

Well, not so much. Among 18-29-year-olds, 60 percent approve of the law as opposed to 32 percent who oppose it.

So, what does this mean?

Well, without actually talking to the respondents, it’s hard to say for certain, but what you’re seeing happen in Missouri is that non-white folks such as Hispanics and African-Americans are fairly ambivalent to the measure or openly supportive because they may recognize that enforcement of gun control laws tends to land on their communities harder than anywhere else.

It may also have to do with more from these groups buying guns over the last year and a half. They now recognize that the Second Amendment really does protect their right to keep and bear arms, not just the rights of white folks. As such, the Second Amendment Preservation Act protects them as much as anyone else.

What’s not to like about that?

Regardless, it does seem that a law that has stirred up so much hate and discontent outside of Missouri hasn’t stirred up nearly as much within the state. It’s almost like the media doesn’t actually understand the American people all that well, especially in a state not on the coast. Shocking, I know, but here we are.

The Second Amendment Preservation Act doesn’t appear to be in a position to cost anyone their seat, which I know breaks the hearts of state Democrats.

Well, 84 percent of them, anyway.