Gun control advocates often present polling data claiming that many Americans support their preferred policies. Gun rights, we’re told, don’t really matter to people. Safety is what matters.

Frankly, polls aren’t going to sway me because our rights aren’t dependent on popular opinion. If they were, they wouldn’t be rights.

But then there are questions about whether Americans really do care about gun rights.

A new poll suggests that they just might.

Despite the aggressive push of increasingly restrictive gun control from Democrats and other left-leaning politicians, many Americans are suggesting that legal gun ownership is the way to go.

This is confirmed by a new RMG Research poll conducted by Scott Rasmussen, which shows that 62% of likely voters say they would prefer living in a community where people are allowed to own firearms. On the flip side, a quarter of voters (25%) say they would rather live in a gun-free community. 13% of voters said they were unsure.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Republicans were more likely to indicate a desire to live in a community that allows gun ownership.

“Republicans, by an 84% to 12% margin, prefer a community where guns are allowed,” the survey reads. “Democrats
are evenly divided.”

Now, that’s genuinely interesting.

It’s also interesting that right after Uvalde, only 47 percent preferred to live where gun ownership was permitted, but that it’s now back to the levels it usually holds at. It just goes to show you that post-massacre, people get emotional and will back any kind of gun control so long as they can tell themselves they’re doing good. Yet when they calm down, they return to baseline.

Further, this tells us that even a big chunk of Democrats prefer gun ownership to a ban.

Of course, many will try to tell us that gun control isn’t about banning firearms completely, but let’s also be realistic here. What many say they want to see is little different from an actual gun ban. They want to restrict them so heavily that they might as well be completely prohibited.

They can rationalize all they want, but the truth is that they’ll tell themselves they don’t want a total gun ban while pushing anything just short of it.

Yet this poll suggests that what Americans want is to see their gun rights respected. Oh, they may not want unfettered gun access and a repeal of every gun control law currently on the books, but it makes it clear that gun control advocates are going to run into a wall sooner or later.

That’s good news for us and opens the door a bit. It means we simply need to do a better job of reaching this 62 percent of folks and making the case to move their personal Overton Window toward the gun rights side of things even more.

If we can do that, we can put an end to the constant threats to the Second Amendment and preserve the right to keep and bear arms for generations to come.

That is something we should all want to see.