Many gun rights supporters believe that gun owners tend to become gun voters, at least to some degree. That’s not universal, of course, because Kamala Harris has a handgun and she was all about banning them for everyone else, but we tend to think people like her are the exception, rather than the rule. However, the results of a survey from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Gun Violence Solutions suggest otherwise.
In fact, according to this survey, some of the gun control lobby’s biggest asks for state and federal lawmakers are extremely popular, and not just with anti-gun Democrats.
Among the many claims, the survey argues that 62 percent of gun owners support mandatory storage, only 37 percent of gun owners support constitutional carry laws, 61 percent of gun owners support permit-to-purchase laws, and 70 percent of them support red flag laws.
Now, I can see some people who ordinarily support gun rights for the most part, but still have some fuddish tendencies, possibly being uncomfortable with constitutional carry or liking red flag laws, but the rest? Seems a bit of a stretch.
After all, who did they talk to, and what questions did they ask specifically? After all, if you ask a bunch of California liberals who also happen to own a firearm what they think, you’re going to get different answers from a libertarian from Wyoming with enough guns to arm a small third-world nation.
The problem is, there’s a lack of any link to the raw data, the survey questions ask, or anything of that type. We’re just supposed to accept that when they asked about mandatory storage, the question wasn’t, “Should gun owners lock their guns up when not in use?” as opposed to “Should the state or federal governments pass a law mandating that people store guns?”
Those are two very different questions, after all, and the lack of any link to the specific wording of the survey tells me that they may well have known precisely what they were doing, because how many of us have seen this reflected in any way, shape, or form among those we know who own guns but might not be die-hard gun rights people?
I mean, you’re legitimately telling me that almost two-thirds of gun owners support permit-to-purchase requirements, knowing good and well that NICS checks are already performed for most gun transfers? Seriously?
Yet, because of the lack of specific questions is more than a little troubling. Sure, Google’s AI “helpfully” provided some questions that are reportedly used, but the links it provides do not support the AI’s claims. The questions aren’t there, at least as of this writing.
Year after year, Johns Hopkins releases these “findings” with the same failure of transparency and expects us to take them seriously, that maybe we’re wrong about what gun owners actually believe.
Obviously, I don’t think anything of the sort, but even if I did, the stands we make on the Second Amendment don’t rely on the bandwagon fallacy of assuming that because something is popular, it is the right thing. Instead, it stands on the Constitution itself, which cannot be superseded by a survey from an outfit that bears the name of one of the most notorious gun control advocates.
After all, at one time, laws against the races intermarrying were popular. Prohibition was popular enough to get a constitutional amendment ratified. Eugenics was popular a hundred years ago. All kinds of terrible things have been popular at some point or another, so popularity is hardly a convincing narrative from our perspective.
And pro-gun lawmakers aren’t buying this crap either, because they know better.
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