A recent Gallup poll showing support for stricter gun laws is up 14 points since October, and 55 percent of Americans not only want to enforce existing gun laws but also want new ones is proof Second Amendment advocates need to up their efforts to educate the public about guns, and rights, heading into the midterm elections.
According to Fox News, the recent Gallup poll “showed a majority of American adults say gun policies were ‘extremely important’ when it came to how they decide to cast their vote in this year’s midterm elections, despite just 8% citing guns as the most important problem facing the country.”
Last October, support for tougher gun laws was down at 52 percent, the poll revealed. The number went up in the aftermath of the two mass shootings in May, in Buffalo and Uvalde.
Perhaps poll respondents don’t realize the suspects in both cases passed background checks, and in New York specifically, gun laws are already strict. Yet the allegedly racially-motivated suspect accused of killing ten people at the Tops supermarket still committed the heinous crime.
The Gallup poll was conducted June 1-20.
In a separate report, Fox learned from “man-on-the-street” interviews how polarized people have become. One woman from New York confessed, “I would never vote for a Republican, and would vote for a Democrat this fall if they were focused on implementing stricter gun control, the Fox story detailed. The interviews appear to have been done in New York and Massachusetts. In the Midwest or West, the network might have gotten vastly different responses.
Fox noted, “One of the most striking numbers in the poll showed 55% said gun policies were ‘extremely important’ when it came to their vote in the midterm elections, with 27% saying it was ‘very important.’
This combined 82% was the highest recorded by Gallup since 2000.”
Another revelation from Fox is that the typical party line split for the latter question “was significantly smaller than the previous ones, with 65% of Democrats, 54% of Republicans, and 48% of Independents saying gun policies were ‘extremely important’ to their votes in November.”
Still, Gallup found waning support for a ban on so-called “assault rifles…down to 55% from 61% in Aug. 2019.”
Fox noted the poll “did not provide a definition of an ‘assault rifle,’ which are commonly incorrectly conflated with semi-automatic firearms.”
