The path forward

Lobbying and money in politics only gets you so far. It nudges government in a one direction or the other but changes in the mindset of the people is what makes the real differences. On the gun issue we are taking new shooters to the range and creating more gun owners. We can legally carry guns in public in all 50 states (theoretically, in some jurisdictions it is still impractical or even impossible in practice). Crime rates are dropping as gun ownership increases. And most importantly the mindset of the general population is changing:

According to Quinnipiac, when asked, “Do you support or oppose stricter gun control laws in the United States?” 48 percent of all voters responded by opposing gun control while 45 percent responded by favoring more.

When broken down by parties, only 16 percent of Democrats opposed more gun control. A full 76 percent of Democrats–roughly 3 out of 4–want more of it. Republicans were just the opposite, with only 23 percent supporting more gun control while 73 percent–roughly 3 out of 4–oppose adding more laws.

Independents oppose more gun control by a margin of 49 to 45.

I haven’t done the math so it’s a little difficult to know what this means for the electoral vote count for President. It could be that the Anti-Gun Presidential Candidate is only looking at the short term to the nomination and will attempt to switch directions after the nomination. But we need to keep doing what we are doing and create more and more gun owners. Give or sell cheap your old guns to people without guns. Give them some skin in the game when a politician tells them how they are “a minority of people that hold a viewpoint that terrorizes a majority of people”. That’s right. Some politicians believe that just holding a viewpoint terrorizes people. Such politicians are not fit to be on a government payroll and the more gun owners there are the less likely they be successful in gaining power and if they are successful the less likely they will be to impose their anti-freedom agenda upon the good people of this country.

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11 thoughts on “The path forward

  1. Hey Joe, I just need to correct one statement from this post: “We can legally carry guns in public in all 50 states.”

    Actually, here in Hawaii not one single person in the entire state has a CCW license. So no one here can legally carry a gun in public. THEORETICALLY people could, as the law states that “in an exceptional case” a police chief MAY grant a CCW license, but in FACT no one IS “an exceptional case”. I want to go into the absurd firearm (and other arms) laws here in Hawaii that are nothing but attempts to (rather successfully) discourage citizens from owning firearms, much less protecting themselves in public with them. The state has issued four (4) permits in the past 16 years (some apparently via court order due to proven threats of bodily harm), but apparently none of those was re-issued after their one year term.

    In Hawaii, even the county police chiefs’ buddies don’t get CCW licenses. NOT ONE SINGLE LICENSE.

  2. I don’t know what the stats are now — but after the last election (Presidential), there were more registered Democrats than Republicans and Independents combined.

    • Not everyone that registers for a party votes for the party candidate. After a co-worker heard that HRC had TS/SCI information on her email server my co-worker exclaimed, “Really? That it. I’m not voting for her.” This is someone who openly proclaims, “I’m a liberal!” She also openly talks of how evil the Republicans are. The gun issue would probably also further confirm her rejection of HRC. I probably should take her to the range to just reinforce that a bit…

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  4. Since the last presidential election, the number of actual gun owners has significantly increased. We’ve seen it in every state that requires a permit just to own a firearm like Illinois, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Hawaii, and I have a hard time believing it isn’t true in other states.

    The numbers are increasing on their own, but of course there’s nothing wrong with doing your part to help it along!

    I’m leery of taking surveys as an accurate measure of the gun owning public: The GSS and Pew polls show a steady drop, but Gallup doesn’t, so the data is conflicting on that at best, and if you look at the Gallup poll, there was a suspicious drop from 51% in 1993 to 38% in 1996, between the enactment of the Brady Law and Assault Weapons Ban, and there wasn’t a concurrent glut of several tens of millions of used guns on the used market back then, so I suspect that people have, over the years, become more wary of actually admitting to a stranger over the phone or in person that they own a firearm.

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