There are really two stories in the recent Gallup Poll that shows Americans are throwing out the orc Koolaid on gun control.
One is the immediately-presenting one; Americans are growing beyond supporting gun control
Recent polls show shrinking support for new gun control measures and strong public sentiment for enforcing existing laws instead. So strong is the shift in public opinion that a proposed assault-weapons ban — once backed by three in four Americans — now rates barely one in two.
And actual “support” will be lower than that; the support for gun control has always been “a mile wide and an inch deep”, extending to “answering surveys”. When asked for specifics about bans, or informed about inconvenient truths (like “assault weapon” is a meaningless, political term), support drops markedly. And membership in the NRA has always outstripped that of all victim disarmament groups, like the Violence Policy Institute and the Brady Factory, by 20-1.
Even an assault-weapon ban is not the political “sure thing” it once was…Elected officials in California and Pennsylvania have responded to the killings of four police officers in Oakland, Calif., and three in Pittsburgh by calling for restoration of the decade-long ban, which was law from 1994 to 2004. Gun control advocates also have pushed to revive the ban as a way to stem the flow of firearms smuggled from the U.S. into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.
Gallup’s Newport said the growing opposition to gun control is “counterintuitive” because of the heavy media focus on the use of assault weapons to kill police officers and students, as well as coverage of cartel lawlessness.
It’s only counterintuitive if you’re completely ignorant. This poll could show us a couple of things; that Americans are believing mainstream media hype less (as in the police shootings); that the alternative media is undercutting some of the orcs’ lies (as with the “Cartel” myth, in which conservative blogs and talkradio debunked the orc meme about guns from “gun shows” arming the cartels.
Rep. John Culberson, R-Houston, called diminished public support for gun control measures “a good thing.” He said the recent poll findings would help lawmakers “resist pressure from this administration to pass more gun control legislation.”
“The NRA is in a pretty good position, public-opinion-wise,” Newport said.
So as to the gun control issue itself, this is a good thing.
The other story – which is, in the long term, the bigger one? This should be a lesson to conservatives. The rollback of orc superstition and bigotry on the gun issue is one of the great grassroots victories in modern political history. The gun rights movement has been the class war the far left has always warned us about – except that in this case it’s been the plebeians that have taken the high road and defeated the patricians, our “elite” media and political establishments. And we’ve done it one vote, and one voter, at a time, through dedicated, constant, low-level grassroots action.
The same can, and needs to, go for other conservative principles. Winning this nation back isn’t a matter of waiting for another Reagan to walk across the water; it’s a matter of getting out there and convincing people, one at a time.
And it’s working for more than just gun control; general support for abortion has cooled in the past decade, and I have a hunch we’ll see greatly eroding support for out-of-control Keynesianism before too terribly long.
If you’d like some insight on conditions that led to the personal right to own firearms, check out Heroes and Hunters of the West (available from gutenberg here: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/26965). Heroes and Hunters was put together sometime in the mid-19th century from written and oral sources dating back to the time of the French And Indian Wars. It’s basically a bunch of stories of the early Frontier east of the Mississippi. A typical narrative goes like this: Farmer returns to his isolated homestead after working in the fields all day to find his wife scalped by Indians & his children dead or missing. Farmer raises the alarm, and forms an armed posse with his neighbors. Marauding Indians are located and a vicious battle ensues. Fighting is hand-to-hand and both sides take scalps.
This is not the West that Hollywood made famous. There is no desert or tall mountain range. There is also no cavalry to come to the rescue. The fighters were family men and part time soldiers, aka “the militia”. If they had had fully automatic weapons or artillery pieces or napalm they would have used them in legitimate defense of their homes.