Category: Gun Rights

Household gun ownership is increasing. That tells me we definitely have a decent amount of uninitiated people entering the shooting world. Most of us experienced in the issue aren’t going to talk to random people calling to ask about guns in the house.

But let me talk for a minute about the actual poll. I’m going to assume below that you skim the poll.

Household gun ownership: It’s good news that overall household gun ownership has increased, but if that’s all happening in red states, it actually doesn’t help us. What I see is an increasing divide between Republicans and Democrats on the gun issue. If that managed to marginalize the Democrats so they couldn’t win elections, that would be fine, but it does not appear the Democratic Party is in decline. A big increase in household gun ownership in swing states would be great news. We have some good evidence that it’s increasing in blue states, but real polling would be helpful.

Gender gap: The gender gap on the issue is still very significant. It would be interesting to see gender cross tabs broken down by race. I suspect we’re doing much better with white women, but not doing as much to reach minority women.

Generation gap: There’s no serious generation gap on the issues the Dems are likely to be able to achieve on, except for a federal database of gun sales. Unfortunately, millennials aren’t very big privacy wonks. Millennials do seem, however, to have figured out the “assault weapons” issue is bullshit.

Overall I’d say the poll is good news. But I’m worried about anti-gun attitudes becoming a shibboleth among Democrats. If they can achieve that kind of cultural unity, and still win elections, eventually our goose is going to get cooked.

Time has an interesting story on how most Americans think their views on guns are the majority view, even when they are not. This has been a consistent issue since I started writing about gun politics a decade ago. You see it all the time in people who whine about the Hughes Amendment (the 1986 machine gun ban), or various other this and thats we can’t change because it’s beyond our political power. For years I had to explain that the NFA was untouchable because the fact was that a majority of Americans (and I would argue gun owners) did not agree with us, and more importantly neither did a majority of lawmakers. There was no easy way to convince lawmakers that voting to repeal the NFA was in their political interests, and if we wanted to change that, we had to work on the people, not the politicians.

Now a decade later, I think getting suppressors/silencers delisted from the NFA may be within reach if we have a few favorable elections, and the Dems start falling apart the same way the Republicans are falling apart. The reason for that is we have very compelling arguments, both in terms of being kind to neighbors’ ears and also to our own. The arguments we can use for suppressors are easily understandable to people who don’t shoot. They are almost definitely understandable to anyone living near a shooting range in a suburban area, of which I can point to several examples near where I live. It might be possible for gun ranges to mandate suppressor use if they were deregulated. Right now that’s completely unrealistic, because your average shooter isn’t going to bother with all the regulatory compliance involved.

The article speaks of the “false consensus effect.”:

In a less formal sense, the “false consensus effect” was on display at the political conventions, where both parties presented their views on the virtues or dangers of owning a firearm as representing the common-sense attitude of most Americans. Republican nominee Donald J. Trump declared that he would “protect the right of all Americans to keep their families safe,” while Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy took the stage at the Democratic Convention to declare that “the gun lobby fights to keep open glaring loopholes that 90 percent of Americans want closed.”

This is why it’s important to be open with people about what you spend your weekends doing. The false consensus effect can either be our friend or our enemy. Which way that goes depends on us being good ambassadors.

I get that California gun owners are in desperate straits, so I don’t really blame them for desperate measures, but this is a desperate measure that’s practically guaranteed to fail and backfire. NRA is smart for not getting involved. There’s always a tendency among people active in politics to assume their positions are more popular than they really are. The reality is that most of the voting public doesn’t know bunk about your pet issue, taxation, deficits, etc. Most of the public thinks most of the federal budget goes to foreign aid. They point out that California beat the handgun freeze proposal in 1982, and that is true, but the demographics of California have changed greatly since 1982. Take a good hard look at those numbers. They do not add up to this being winnable.

At this time the NRA and other gun groups are not on board. Giving them the benefit of doubt, I believe the reason for their lack of involvement at this time has to do with the fact that they have played ‘defense’ and what we are doing here is ‘offense’.

No, the reason NRA is not on board is likely because ballot fights cost a ton of money, the victory almost always goes to the side that spends the most money, and we cannot outspend Bloomberg, Silicon Valley oligarchs, and all the other lefty groups in California that are guaranteed to pour money into defeating us.

I hate to say it, because it pains me to say it, but California is lost if we can’t save it through the courts or federal preemption. Given that the GOP is a hot dumpster fire right now full of unserious and stupid “elites” and an unserious and naive base, both are looking pretty unlikely. In the past I’ve been reluctant to tell people to move out of their states, rather than stay and fight, but at this point that’s what we’re looking at. It’s time to move out of California if you live there and are a gun owner. The only thing this ballot measure is likely to accomplish is giving Bloomberg another head on his pike, and that’s going to help carry California’s bullshit to other states, not prevent it.

NBC News is reporting “Millennials Are Less Likely to Support Gun Control Than You’d Think.” There’s a component of that generation that borrowed radicalism from their late boomer parents. But for the most part Millennials are more open to letting people do their thing if they aren’t bothering anyone. They are tolerant to a fault, if anything. There isn’t a whole lot of busy-body in that generation. So there is hope. But like I’ve said many times, if we can’t get them voting on gun rights, it won’t matter.

From the Columbus Dispatch, “More African-Americans favoring owning guns, but racial inequity alleged on exercise of rights.”

Smith’s forum reflects what researchers see as growing interest among African-Americans in gun ownership. But becoming a black licensed gun owner is not a risk-free prospect, a fact brought to light this month by the police shooting of Philando Castile, who had a permit to carry a concealed weapon when he was shot in his car July 6, and by the presence at a Dallas rally the next day of perhaps 30 marchers openly carrying rifles.

Dallas police mistakenly labeled a black licensed gun owner as a “person of interest” after a black gunman who was not part of the rally opened fire, killing five police officers.

Read the whole thing. I’d expect that person would have been a “person of interest” no matter what color the protesters were. That isn’t intended to undermine the issue, because I think it’s real. It’s important that the RKBA movement keep spreading the history. If we can crack into the black community, women, and hispanics, the gun control movement has no viable future, even if Bloomberg keeps spending big.

College rifle and pistol teams are coming under fire in the current fascist PC conformity that’s the current vogue in academia. What colleges and universities are doing is banning the groups from taking funding from NSSF and NRA to support their programs. The kids today are open to the shooting sports, because they don’t come with a whole lot of preconceived prejudices towards things. If we can get them hooked on shooting, it’ll be something they care about, and that will translate into something they vote on.