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.”
How do you square the evidence that stricter gun controls reduce gun death rates with the tepid support shown for stricter gun controls in nationwide polls? It’s fairly simple: the national polls are skewed by the pro-gun numbers in the Red states. If you polled only Blue states, support for gun control would come out well over 52%. (Anyone who wants to take a shot at a more exact calculation based on the World Population Review table has my encouragement.)
The Red/Blue divide on guns underscores the cultural divide characterized by many issues besides guns—climate, public health, government spending, factory farming, use of government lands, EPA regulation, etc. That’s what Michael Moore pessimistically alluded to last week when Chris Hayes asked him about the chance to reform gun laws nationally. Moore said you won’t get critical change without a cultural shift big enough to overcome existing political obstacles. Since the composition of the U.S Senate gives an outsized weight to Red states—a weight compounded by the filibuster—the pro-gun culture has disproportionate leverage at the national level. For a discussion of just how undemocratic the Senate is, see the numbers in: Democracy’s Deathbed: the U.S. Senate.
The Senate cannot be changed from the outside. In its current state of paralysis, changing it from the inside is a nonstarter.
(It’s understandable that many on the left want to eliminate or radically limit the power of the filibuster. But consider this scenario: the filibuster is eliminated; the Senate and the House go to a Republican majority; the Republican majority in Senate, even a 51-49 majority, passes a national anti-abortion bill which a Republican House would also pass. Right now, the bill could not survive a presidential veto because of the requirement of a supermajority to override a veto. But if a Republican becomes president in 2024, without the filibuster the Democrats would have little chance of stopping an antiabortion bill. Or a national “right to work” law and other pernicious items on the Republican wish list.)
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court—another undemocratic institution with immense power over American lives—is expected to strike down or dilute the effectiveness of state gun control laws in their impending decision on a New York State concealed carry law (followup note, on June 23 the Court actually did strike down the New York law, although the ruling lets states prohibit guns in “sensitive places,” likely going beyond locations such as courthouses and legislative buildings those that historically met that definition.) That the makeup of the current Supreme Court has been created by unscrupulous political actors manipulating a flawed governmental structure doesn’t matter. It is what it is.
One glimmer of hope in the fight against gunmakers, if not gun users, is a federal judge’s decision to throw out a lawsuit by gun manufacturers challenging the constitutionality of a New York law that allows the state and people affected by gun violence to sue the industry. It’s a glimmer that might be doused by a U.S. Supreme Court somewhere down the line. But anything that sets gun manufacturers back on their heels, even if temporarily, is a blow for public safety.
Is Bad Stuff who we are?
When Michael Moore, who has been tracking gun violence for more than two decades, expressed his pessimism on MSNBC last week, he dwelled on the fact that American history is laced through and through with violence, much of it associated with racism: from the extermination of most native Americans and dispossession of the rest, through slavery enforced by violence, Jim Crow terrorism, to the continued oppression of the Black minority to this very day.
Recently Moore pushed back on the bromide “this is not who we are” that has become a rhetorical staple on liberal media in response to hate, abuse, violence , and other forms of depravity—Bad Stuff. On the contrary, Moore said, when it comes to Bad Stuff, violence in particular, “this IS who we are.”
This shot of sarcasm is not meant to repudiate the hopefulness of Moore’s liberal friends—he loves them and their hopes. But it is to ask for a harder look at who we really are. How guilty are we of wishful thinking? Are we deluding ourselves, and if so what’s the remedy? Why do we (liberals, I mean) go around claiming that the “vast majority” of Americans are asking for stronger gun laws, when polls conducted by well-established organizations such as Pew Research and Gallup indicate that is just not true? That the majority in favor of stricter laws in America—except in the immediate aftermath of mass shootings—is slim and probably falling?
Mass shootings such as the horrific slaughter of children in elementary schools get national headlines, but in fact their victims constitute a very thin slice of the national carnage. More than half of gun deaths are suicides. Street crime and gang violence account for a large share of the rest. But you don’t hear about them on cable news except in connection with a mass shooting.
The NRA, right wing radicalization, and minority rule
Former gun manufacturing executive Ryan Busse has tied marketing by the National Rifle Association directly to the radicalization of the political right wing and its hijacking of the Republican Party. His 2021 book Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry that Radicalized America is a memoir and a warning. In the chilling video below he outlines the phases by which the NRA corrupted the traditional American gun culture in order to propel sales—out of which evolved an alliance between an industry and a political movement that became ever more tightly-knit. The politics of hate and the glorification of gun violence are now as closely intertwined as copulating snakes.
The historian Heather Cox Richardson put the coupling of gun zealotry with radical right-wing politics into a wider historical context in a May 24 essay in her substack account “Letters from an American.” Once upon a time, she points out, the NRA supported what we would call today “common sense gun laws.” That shifted during the 70s and 80s, coupled with the rise of Movement Conservatism, which arose “to combat the business regulations and social welfare programs that both Democrats and Republicans embraced after World War II. Movement Conservatives embraced the myth of the American cowboy as a white man standing against the ‘socialism’ of the federal government.” The gun began to become a part of the identity of the lone individual fighting against government tyranny. (There’s hardly any equivalency between lone individuals and giant corporations, but we’re talking about a mystique, not reality.) In passing Richardson noted that the same theme was central to Star Wars—the lone Luke Skywalker taking on the Evil Empire.
The 1976 presidential candidate Ronald Reagan took a stand against gun control when he ran against Gerald Ford, and in 1980 the NRA endorsed a presidential candidate for the first time—Reagan. Reagan personified the cowboy mystique for the public (although he had only six cowboy roles during his acting career)—and promoted the idea that government was crushing the individualism that had made America great.
In the 1990s, the NRA began to milk the marriage of political conservatism with gun rights for all it was worth, and by 2000 it was one of the three most powerful lobbies in Washington. Increasingly, the NRA financed Republic candidates in the 20-teens, culminating in the 2016 election, where it “spent over $50 million on Republican candidates, including more than $30 million on Trump’s effort to win the White House. This money was vital to Trump, since many other Republican super PACs refused to back him.”
Establishment Republican PACs were wary of the pro-Trump populist groundswell. But if Republicans were troubled by the potential for violent insurrection, they had only themselves to blame for the unholy alliance they had made with the NRA.
The video below of an interview between Richardson and Michelle Martin brings out the highlights of Richardson’s trenchant analysis of the links between influence of the NRA, the cult of individualism, Movement Conservatism, and America’s slide into minority rule.
There are three shortcomings evident in the otherwise excellent Martin/Richardson interview: (1) to start with the premise that a great majority of Americans favor stricter gun laws is, as we have seen from polls, to argue from a set of liberal “alternative facts;” (2) she fails to touch on the structural flaws in the U.S. Constitution (the Senate; the Electoral College; the Supreme Court)—not that she’s unaware of them but leaves those out of the discussion; (3) positing that the majority of Americans will not “put up with” minority rule ignores the brutal fact that Ryan Busse speaks of: guns in the hands of a minority itching to use them against an outgunned majority to upend the democratic process.
There’s an object lesson from the Civil War: the side with the most guns and ammunition won. Numerical superiority simply in number of combatants alone would not have overcome the South. White nationalists have taken that lesson very much to heart. They are not bent on occupying territory with the kind of clear geographic boundaries as we saw in the 19th Century Civil War; they are bent on something bigger. They are bent on building a nation of terror with an autocrat at its head, and the American form of democracy may be too flawed to stop it.
Unchecked capitalism brings social ruin—at ground level
The parallel between the gun industry and the fossil fuel industry is clear: their success depends on the public acceptance of violence. The fossil fuel industry’s form of violence is not as obvious. It is a byproduct. It is the result of externalizing costs on a massive scale. If the industry had to pay those costs it would send our carbon-dependent economy into a tailspin. That is the gun the industry is holding to our heads: the threat of economic depression. That is why they are getting away with a global crime. The industry is not shooting people with literal bullets, but it is damaging the environment and poisoning people in a way that will eventually kill tens if not hundreds of millions.
Both industries have multiplied their power by injecting billions of dollars into the political system—a system that is increasingly “rigged,” although not the way Donald Trump speaks of it. It’s a positive feedback loop—the more they rig the system, the more resources they get to rig it even more.
There’s a good argument to be made that capitalism has served humanity well overall—despite its social costs, it has brought about a level of material prosperity that would have been unthinkable 300 years ago. But there comes a tipping point at which unchecked capitalism’s social and environmental costs overburden a democratic political system, and democracy cracks and eventually collapses.
We are at that point. The plutocrats—especially those involved with media—have the means to turn things around but they are choosing not to. Their wealth largely insulates them from what is happening on the ground where the rest of us live. From the choices they are making, it appears they don’t care much about democracy. They’re betting they don’t need to. The model of Russian oligarchs shows that if you have money and play your political cards right you can just keep on sailing no matter what form of government you’re sailing with.
I might be wrong that this is the inevitable evolution of capitalism. Maybe it’s just the work of a few bad actors. The book The Man Who Broke Capitalism by New York Times reporter and columnist David Gelles lays it at the feet of one man—GE’s Jack Welch. An article in the May-June Mother Jones, “Looters,” pegs private equity firms as the leading villains. (Please anybody subscribe to Mother Jones—they’re operating on a shoestring and they do great journalism.)
Time will tell. The Bad Actor Donald Trump could be found guilty of breaking our political system, but he was hardly alone. The system—corrupted by big money and exploited by reactionary institutions such as the Heritage Foundation—opened the door to Donald Trump.
RECENT POLLS ON AMERICANS’ SUPPORT FOR STRICTER GUN LAWS
Gallup Poll (most recently amended in Jan 2022) finds support for stricter gun laws in decline since March 2018: https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/393092/americans-recent-attitudes-toward-guns.aspx
Gallup Poll (Nov. 2021) on decline in support of stricter gun laws: https://news.gallup.com/poll/357317/stricter-gun-laws-less-popular.aspx
Pew Research (Aug. 2021) on policy differences between gun owners and non-gun owners: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/04/wide-differences-on-most-gun-policies-between-gun-owners-and-non-owners-but-also-some-agreement/
Pew Research (Feb. 2022) : stats on gun deaths that includes this surprising statement: “The gun murder and gun suicide rates in the U.S. both remain below their peak levels.” This poll did not discuss attitudes toward gun controls: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/02/03/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/
Pew Research (Sep 2021): “Key facts about Americans and guns” discusses gun ownership statistics as well as polling on preferences for gun control:
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/09/13/key-facts-about-americans-and-guns/