A majority of Wisconsinites either want weaker gun laws or want them to stay the same. The same is true of voters in Colorado. This doesn’t look like a groundswell of support for our opponents, nor does it represent a major shift in public opinion. One also has to wonder if folks answering that it’s OK to ban high-capacity magazines realize it’s the magazine in their Glock that’s being banned.
There was a lot of this in the past. Thirdpower is talking a bit about manipulating polling. Our opponents have long pointed to polling numbers to try to convince politicians that the American people were with them, only to get their asses handed to them at election time. The difference is there’s a substantial motivation gap when it comes to voting on the issue between our side and theirs, and the politicians know that.
The other side reifies polls and tries to claim poll numbers are equivalent to support. Meanwhile the anti gun orgs go broke all over the nation, guns fly off the shelves, ammo is sold in record amounts, and concealed licenses are at all time highs.
Charge right through them, they are demoralized as hell.
“The difference is there’s a substantial motivation gap when it comes to voting on the issue between our side and theirs, and the politicians know that.”
Mostly the politicians do, but not always. Perhaps fortunately, because those politicians tend to prove our point. Some years back a woman who had been a very popular Democratic county row officer ran for the 31st Rep. District seat on a platform of almost nothing but gun control, and really got her ass handed to her; and Dwight Evans, a longtime incumbent rep in Philadelphia tried to move up the ladder in a Democratic primary by running on all gun control, and lost bigtime, too. I would have expected those experienced pols to know better, but apparently they didn’t, and no one told them. I was a bit surprised how poorly it played in Philadelphia.
We get our most irritation from gun control politicians in exceedingly safe districts/states like Dianne Feinstein in California. We need to have the NRA strongly support a good challenger and while we might not win, we might encourage a little more respect from them.
If they are afraid of losing their lifetime membership as the ruling elite, they might listen to little people like me.
Just thinking out loud again. . .
What would NRA members think if the NRA were to back a candidate in one of those “safe” districts that was a flaming liberal on everything — except gun rights? Someone like that would have the best chance of pulling off an upset, but I’m not convinced at all that “single issue” people really are, and the people who make the decisions at the NRA are no less human than the rest of us.
We already kind of saw the answer to that last election with Harry Reid. The rumor that there was going to be an endorsement set off membership big time. An endorsement was not forthcoming. Maybe Reid didn’t really deserve it, even from strictly a gun point of view (I think there’s a good argument), but I doubt that’s what most of the membership was angry at.
True, but that was somewhat complicated by other factors.
First, Reid was not only a liberal, but a Democrat and Senate Majority leader, so almost everyone in our camp was already preconditioned to think of him as Satan’s Spawn. I would seriously doubt that NRA endorsement delivered more than a small handful of votes for him, and I wouldn’t be surprised if his opponent received a few extra votes from gun owners voting in outrage, who otherwise might have taken the NOTA option that Nevada offers.
On the other hand, Republican Sharron Angle was as crazy as a shithouse rat, and a friend who was on the Nevada Republican Committee and met with her, said he found her worse in person than even her liberal critics painted her. He said that he personally would not lift a finger to help her campaign. I’m just offering that as one more reason why possibly the NRA didn’t support her, but dared not say so in public for fear of offending their core constituency even worse than they did.
My “suppose” is based on, an imagined scenario where the challenger is a “liberal Republican” that everyone else calls a RINO, but in fact is more libertarian — good on guns and taxes but not on board with the social conservatives or theologians. Sort of a split of what went on with Reid, but absent the factor of insanity on the part of one of the candidates.
Pardon the pun, but asking about gun control in the wake of a tragedy is a loaded question, e.g. “How do the recent massacres with easily-obtained weapons of mass destruction affect your views on gun control?”
I wish the polling questions were more open-ended, e.g. “What do you believe could prevent or curtail future mass killings by psychotics?”
Of course, asking open-ended questions instead a fill-in-the-bubble yes/no questionnaire takes time, money, and transparency in how results are interpreted, so we don’t see nearly as many.
Has anyone heard any national figure or organization getting traction in the media with proposals to better control people? All of these guys are either under psychiatric care, show clear signs they should be, or, in the WI case, apparently have criminal histories that should preclude gun ownership. I wish somebody really meant it when they talked about “enforcing the laws we have.”