{"id":4747,"date":"2009-05-08T07:23:59","date_gmt":"2009-05-08T12:23:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4747"},"modified":"2009-05-08T07:23:59","modified_gmt":"2009-05-08T12:23:59","slug":"watching-the-tide-roll-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4747","title":{"rendered":"Watching The Tide Roll In"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are really two stories in the recent Gallup Poll that shows Americans are throwing out the orc Koolaid on gun control.<\/a><\/p>\n

One is the immediately-presenting one; Americans are growing beyond supporting gun control<\/p>\n

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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 \u2014 once backed by three in four Americans \u2014 now rates barely one in two.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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.\u00a0 And membership in the NRA has always outstripped that of all <\/em>victim disarmament groups, like the Violence Policy Institute and the Brady Factory, by 20-1.<\/p>\n

Even an assault-weapon ban is not the political \u201csure thing\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Gallup\u2019s Newport said the growing opposition to gun control is \u201ccounterintuitive\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It’s only counterintuitive if you’re completely ignorant.\u00a0 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’\u00a0 lies (as with the “Cartel” myth, in which conservative blogs and talkradio debunked the orc meme <\/a>about guns from “gun shows” arming the cartels.<\/p>\n

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Rep. John Culberson, R-Houston, called diminished public support for gun control measures \u201ca good thing.\u201d He said the recent poll findings would help lawmakers \u201cresist pressure from this administration to pass more gun control legislation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe NRA is in a pretty good position, public-opinion-wise,\u201d Newport said.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So as to the gun control issue itself, this is a good thing.<\/p>\n

The other story – which is, in the long term, the bigger one?\u00a0 This should be a lesson to conservatives.\u00a0 The rollback of orc superstition and bigotry on the gun issue is one of the great grassroots victories in modern political history.\u00a0 The gun rights movement has been <\/em>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.\u00a0 And we’ve done it one vote, and one voter, at a time, through dedicated, constant, low-level grassroots action.<\/p>\n

The same can, and needs to, go for other conservative principles.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conservatism","category-victim-disarmament"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4747\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}