When it comes to gun control, it’s usually the big cities that want new restrictions passed. Their argument is that crime there is different and more endemic there, so they need it.
For a lot of years, people accepted that. Especially people living in those cities.
However, it seems a new poll is telling us that people aren’t buying that gun control actually helps deal with crime.
Americans do not believe that strict gun laws are properly addressing the rise in retail crime in major cities, a Convention of States Action/Trafalgar Group survey released Wednesday found.
The survey asked respondents, “Do you believe that the strict gun laws in most major cities are making the current retail crime surge better or worse?”
Overall, a plurality, or 47.1 percent, said they are making “no difference.” Over one-third, 37.3 percent, said the laws are making it “worse,” while 15.6 percent say “better.”
A majority of Republicans, 54.6 percent, said the gun laws are making the crime “worse,” but a majority of Democrats (53.8 percent) and independents (50.7 percent) said it makes “no difference.”
What’s interesting is that a mere 30.1 percent of Democrats think gun control laws are helping compared to just 7.3 percent of Republicans and 9.8 percent of independents. Now, one would expect Democrats to be more likely to buy into the idea that gun control helps with this, but one might expect the number to be higher…
…except we’re talking about retail crime. That’s typically stuff like shoplifting, which has been really awful in places like California where they’re not even trying to hide what they’re doing.
Guns usually don’t play a factor.
However, it’s properly defined as any crime against a retail establishment. That would include armed robberies. Those have been fairly ugly as well of late, and yet what we’re seeing is a lot of people simply not thinking that gun control is the answer for this.
This is especially interesting not because of the breakdown across party lines, but because almost 83 percent of the American population lives in a city.
Despite that, 74 percent of the people surveyed think gun control laws are either doing nothing to help or making it worse despite living in cities which, in theory, should preclude them to see gun control as a solution.
Over the last couple of years, the push for gun control has been pretty intense. However, it looks like the American public really is waking up to the fact that restricting the law-abiding has little impact on what criminals do.
This isn’t the first poll showing something like this, either. We’ve seen several polls where support for gun control appears to be waning.
The pendulum appears to be swinging back.
Will it matter? Not to some. The gun control crowd will continue to use old polls that show what they want to try and justify their preferred policies while ignoring any inconvenient polling data to the contrary. There are people actually think that majority rules should impact everything, including whether or not we can access a basic right like the right to keep and bear arms.
Luckily, there aren’t nearly as many of them as they’d like to believe, but even if there were, it looks like they missed their opportunity. For everyone, that’s actually a good thing.
