A Pew Research Center report…found a majority of Americans support a wide variety of new measures, some by enormous margins. For example, 85% of Americans favor making private gun sales and sales at gun shows subject to background checks, while 80% support laws to prevent mentally ill people from purchasing guns…. [T]wo-thirds of Americans (67%) favor creating a federal database to track gun sales. In a bit of a surprise, nearly as many people (64%) support having more armed security in schools, boosted by large numbers of self-identified Republicans backing the idea…. The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll reflects similar attitudes. Of particular interest, the survey found, “More than half of Americans — 52 percent in the poll — say the shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., has made them more supportive of gun control; just 5 percent say they are now less apt to back tighter restrictions.
Wayne LaPierre and the rest of the tone-deaf gun nuts can bleat ‘til they’re hoarse, but they can no longer credibly ignore the truth that Americans strongly favor gun control. Sure, that support in many instances is divided along partisan lines, but when you look at the aggregate, the majority of Americans want to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
In the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, public opinion has shifted noticeably. There’s something about 20 elementary school children (and six adults) being massacred that doesn’t sit well with the American public, many of whom have young children of their own. That the NRA and their gun nut constituency can’t seem to grasp the optics behind this debate only demonstrates how politically tone deaf they are. One could credibly argue that these paranoid conspiracy theorists value their guns more than the lives of innocent children and other civilians…and the President is calling them out.
As Cory Booker said on The Rachel Maddow Show last night, there’s nothing this country can’t do when we get together…and it would seem that the majority of us are on the same page. The gun nuts can either get on the bus and become part of the conversation…or they can get run over by it. Either way, change is coming, and with any luck it will make America a safer place. How the gun nuts can argue with that is beyond me.
