In the immediate aftermath of a terrible mass shooting, we often see polling telling us that people favor gun control. Advocates then use those particular polls for years to come, all in an effort to convince people that gun control is a winning proposition and that the public isn't against it. They only change polls when a new one supports their claims.

But things are shifting.

See, gun owners have a tendency to become gun voters. Part of that is because they start to see how the narrative is blatantly false. "You can buy a gun on the internet," they hear, so they try it and find out that technically, you can but you can't take possession of it without going through a background check conducted by a licensed dealer, to name one example. They also find out that having a gun in the home doesn't make you less safe despite all the claims to the contrary.

And recent polling isn't going to make your garden-variety gun-grabber very happy.

So much of today’s political landscape is shaped by polls. Cable news is obsessed with them. Polls are the pulse of campaigns. If they’re down in the polls, political candidates talk about their own internal polling to dispute the narrative. Sometimes they are right. But what really shapes political landscapes are demographic changes. And, with gun ownership, we have a shift that must be troubling gun-control groups and the politicians they support.

Now, more than half of American voters say that they or someone in their household owns a gun, according to a poll by NBC News. This is the highest level of gun ownership this poll has found since it began in 1999. “After progressives drove up firearm ownership with policies that are soft on violent crime, they can’t figure out why their gun-control ideas fail to pass,” said The Wall Street Journal when it cited this poll.

Indeed, according to this survey, the share of voters with a firearm in the household is 52%. This is up from 46% in 2019 and 42% in 2013. Households with a gun in them now include 66% of Republicans, 45% of independents and 41% of Democrats.

Perhaps even more surprising is the fact that the number of registered Democrats who are buying guns is going up faster than the number of Republicans. In 2019, 64% of Republican voters said there was a gun in their home, compared with 33% of Democrats. In the years since, 2% more Republican voters say there is a gun in their home, but for Democrats it has gone up 8%. In fact, since the 2020 election, some 22.3 million Americans exercised their Second Amendment rights by purchasing firearms for the very first time, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF). Might these new gun owners become pro-freedom voters, even though many of them no doubt have supported anti-Second Amendment candidates in the past? 

They just might.

See, if we want to really preserve the right to keep and bear arms from all threats, we need the other side to stop trying to infringe upon that right. I think history has made it very clear that Democrats aren't going to stop doing so simply because they got smacked down by the courts. Look at what happened in states like New York and California after Bruen. They created all new infringements, some in ways far more restrictive than what they were perfectly satisfied with for decades, all because they could.

If you want to end the threat, you need to end the threat. That means Democrats have to have a reason not to push gun control, and that needs to come not from the right, but from their Democratic base.

Politicians may favor certain rules and regulations, but do you know what they favor more? Keeping their jobs.

If their own base is demanding they stop pushing gun control, they'll stop or find themselves defeated in the primary by a Democrat who will.

Of course, there's another alternative. It's possible that these gun-owning Democrats will start advocating for gun rights, be pushed out of their party, and then start finding other areas of common ground with Republicans, thus switching parties entirely, and depowering the Democratic Party completely. Look at what's happened with RFK, Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard for examples.

Either way, this doesn't look particularly good for gun control.

However, the one benefit they have is a media that will push the narrative for them. That means we need to combat that with every fiber of our being. That means we need to support media that will tell the truth, that will stand up to the anti-gun media. A great way to do that--the best way to do that, even--is with one of our VIP memberships, and for a limited time,  you can use the promo code FIGHT and get 60% off of your membership. You'll be saving America and keeping your gun rights nice and secure.