Op-Ed: Growing support for gun rights, and groaning scoundrels who despise the trend

Never doubt the linguistic and logical limberness of professionally coached anti-gun activists.

People in gun control circles are circling their wagons in reaction to a recent Pew Research report definitively showing that more Americans support the Second Amendment than support gun control. Pew’s multi-decade survey on gun control again asked one basic question (among others), namely: “What do you think is more important – to protect the right of Americans to own guns, OR to control gun ownership?” Since any form of gun ownership control is an infringement of the right of Americans to own guns, it is a succinct and reasonably worded question. In the most recent instance of this survey, six percent more Americans think that protecting gun owner rights is more important than enacting gun control.

This isn’t the first time the majority has favored rights over restrictions, though in Pew’s previous polling the margins have been much thinner. Anyone who has watched tracking polls of the past few decades knows that this is the culmination of a long term trend, and is surprising only in as much as Pew’s research appears to be a little behind other surveys (though Pew’s poll was called an “outlier” by an outright liar from a gun control obsessed, maniacal medical school). But members of the media nonetheless flatly proclaimed incorrectly that this was the “first” time Pew had seen gun rights being more popular than gun anti-rights. Maybe this explains why only 40% of the public trusts the news media.

The backlash to Pew’s polling was predictable. Sympathetic left-of-center members of the media sought the opinion of gun control activists to flavor their “reporting.” My favorite was Media Matters, an organization specifically devoted to attacking non-leftist journalism. For a printable quote, they tracked down an assistant professor at the Joyce Foundation funded Center for Gun Policy and Research. Her CV states that she “focuses on how public policies affect mental health, substance use, and gun violence” and also notes that her education is “in Health Policy and Management” but does not mention a background in research methodology design. So when she told Media Matters that Pew’s research was an “outlier,” she either willfully ignored other polling or pulled the conclusion out of her antidepressant pill bag.

Click here to read the entire op-ed at CalGunlaws.com.