Bloomberg’s propaganda branch can whine all they want about the General Social Survey. No one who’s been in this issue for any appreciable amount of time doesn’t believe more women are becoming gun owners. Gun shows around here used to be a sausage fest, and now you see the whole family out, women included. There are a lot more women at the NRA Annual Meeting exhibit floor than there was when I started attending yearly in 2007. I’m seeing more women members joining our club. They can argue it’s anecdotal all they want, but everybody who regularly deal with the ordinary gun-owning public is reporting the same thing.
The problem with the General Social Survey, and other surveys like it, is that it doesn’t measure actual gun ownership. It measures the number of people who are willing to tell a pollster they own guns. You can even see it in their graph: when gun owners are under attack, the numbers go down. When the crisis passes, they go back up. There are plenty of people who will not answer to a stranger they own firearms.
They are in denial because if they lose women, they lose their movement. Women have been the drivers of gun control, traditionally, and with more of them coming over to our side, it will put them in desperate straits. In truth, as long as Bloomberg is willing to continue single-handedly funding the gun control movement, it’ll continue to harass us and our rights, but without women, harassing us is about all they can hope for. They won’t succeed in their real goal, which is the destruction of those rights.
I always felt that when it came to the culture front, the antis losing women and millennials (which it’s looking like they are) will be their Stalingrad.
Upper Middle Class WASP women in their early middle age years seem to be the driving force behind every Prohibitionist movement in American history: the Carrie Nation’s and Sarah Brady’s of the world seem to have a bottomless need to tell everyone else how to live.
Interesting observation. A Big Mother phenomenon?
According to Wikipedia, the GSS is a 90-min face-to-face survey conducted at the University of Chicago. That biases the pool of respondents just a tad.
Apart from people lying to pollsters as gun politics heats up, Bloomberg has another glaring problem. This survey IS showing that more women are owning guns. They are brushing it off by showing a 35 year trend, but since 2010, it has been going up. When you ask someone in the gun industry if they are seeing more women, they don’t say, “well… It’s not like it was back in ’82, so I’m going to say no.”
Also if your state is still backwards enough to still require permits, AND require training, talk to the teachers.
Not only will they say that they have had to increase classes, but what used to be the token girlfriend or wife in a class has become close to a 50/50 gender split.
It seems to me that a greater than ever before proportion of anti-gun propaganda is aimed at bucking up morale of their own side, rather than stampeding the disinterested public into supporting the next great thing of anti-gun leglislation.
More evidence of a dying movement?