Poll: 2/3 of American voters would defy gun laws

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You win the polls, we win the votes... Which do you think matters more?

Also, you should take a look at how those polls are worded and administered, it's very easy to rig a poll to create a desired outcome rather than reflecting reality. See: Frank Luntz.

What polls? Huffington Post? Mercury News? New York Times? Yahoo showed 54% opposed to stricter gun laws recently.

There were a bunch of them. I'll drop a couple of links here, but I don't remember the article I read that listed these. It did mention that one of the polls was from fox news is that helps. Anyway, I can't attest to the veracity of the polls themselves, but I can be sure that the NRA will do what it can to undermine the polls. If they were obscenely biased, that will come out. Certainly some polls are bllsht, and I was surpsied at the numbers.

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/28/poll_fi ... gulations/
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/33 ... -c-w-cooke -- this one is a rebuttal of the polls, should make good reading.
http://www.pollingreport.com/guns.htm

My really question though is what are you guys going to do about it? I read somewhere else that a poll in 2008 showed 20% of people want to ban all guns, all the time. Dude, I don't want my guns taken away either. But from where I'm sitting I see a bunch of scared parents who could care less about gun rights saying "Can't we do something to protect our kids?" and my fellow gun owners are responding with "yeah, you could bite me".

So, the way this will play out is gun rights will become a toxic position for politicians to take. New laws will be made, courts (which are also political) will support those laws, second amendment be damned, and we will all be screwed, all because the NRA and company aren't even willing to talk like adults on the subject.

I am confidant that there is a solution, but I am equally confidant that we will not reach that solution because no one wants to compromise.

^
I don't compromise with wrong.

Just because the majority wants something, doesn't mean it's right. That's an appeal to the majority fallacy.

This is why Democracies can suck [in comparison to well founded, ethical and just Republics] for this very reason as it's majority rule, whether they're right or not.

If 51% of the population of a democracy forced those with an ASD (just using it as an example as it's close to all of us here) to relinquish freedoms, then we'd have to relinquish them or become criminals. Logic and facts need not matter. All that matters is the opinion.

the people pushing for the abbreviated magazines seem to have forgotten all about the legions of .22 rifles out there with integrated magazines that hold more than 10 rounds. also why all the attention on quasi-military rifles and not the handguns which do most of the damage?

Too many people own handguns across the US for any legislation to hopefully pass on the Federal level (hey, Feinstein probably owns one still . She wouldn't want her gun taken away now).

Something like military pattern arms are usually owned by hobbyists and whatnot, which generally equals far less numbers owning them. If there's a small amount of people who own something, it's easier to legislate them, plus, people ignorant of firearms will think something like a semi-auto AR-15 in .223 is far and away a more potent weapon than a bolt or lever gun (you should check out a wonderful video in Afghanistan where a lone Taliban rebel holds off a squad+ armed with the most up to date small arms with a Mosin-Nagant or Lee-Enfield).

Then you have all the .22s with tubular mags that you mention; many have around 20+ in the mag, and a .22LR is going to kill people just as dead as anything else out there in these sorts of things.

Types of firearm bans don't make sense; people can only have single shot rifles? See Cumbria, England (single shots in drive-by shootings); see the "DC Snipers" (even though they had an AR, they only fired one shot).

Bans on all don't make sense either, as the weapons are already there and people will just get them illegally -- kinda like drugs.

(I'm neglecting the fact that innocent people having freedoms taken away by the few bad people who misuse such is poor policy, and it's policy of the fearful, not strong.)

Should people who shoot up first grade classrooms have to use guns registered to themselves?

Should people with potential anti social, anti government views be helped through spending time in work camps in Siberia?

Should people who disagree with movements to abolish the Constitution have their voting rights cancelled?

Since baseball bats, hammers, and other clubs are the most used murder weaopns, should there be waiting periods, background checks, and restrictions on carrying them with other permits, and should there be bat and hammer free zones?

Should all motor vehicle deaths be treated as homicide?

Should the Medical Profession who kills ten times as many as murder through "Errors", be held acountable?

Should target shooting and hunting be listed in the DSM as Pre-Murder Conditions so that those who exhibit this behavior can be locked up for treatment?

Should there be a Citizen Test where a passing grade on our Constitution, form of government, and history be required to register to vote?

We test peoples knowledge of the law, rules of the road, before we allow them to drive.

We require this level of knowledge from immigrants who want to become Citizens.

As one told me, this is the greatest form of government that ever existed on Earth. Why did you not keep it?

If you are not happy with the way we have been doing self government for over 200 years, you are free to ammend the Constitution, leave, or shut up.

There will be no compromise, No part of the Constitution will be given up.

We will be opening reeducation camps for traitors before that happens. No one will be released until they can pass the immigrant Citizenship Test.

"I swear to uphold The Constitution of The United States, against all enemies, foreign and domestic."

So let me ask you, are you feeling lucky?

It's an attempt at divide and conquer; gun culture is not homogenous, and there are traditional hunting and skeet shooting types who look down their noses at the younger shooters with their semi-autos. The gun ban crowd hopes to convince the snobbier shooters to throw the tactical shooters under the bus in order to appease them, on the theory that then they'll leave their over-unders and bolt guns alone. Of course, when banning "assault weapons" doesn't work, as it surely won't (used in less murders than fists), they'll demonize and come after another class of firearm, perhaps "intermediate caliber sniper rifles" (bolt action hunting rifles) or "pocket rockets" (compact handguns). Rinse. Repeat.

for bad or worse, there's just no stuffing the american genie back into the bottle, not with more than one firearm for every man, woman and child.

Yahoo provided a meta analysis of 9 polls from the constitutional daily that all show majority support for gun control laws. In fact the gallup poll that in December indicated that a majority of the population was against the ban of so called assault weapons and semi-automatic weapons is now switched to 60% support for favoring the ban on the sale of those type of weapons.

http://news.yahoo.com/polls-show-americ ... 08128.html

Apparently the continued reporting of incidences since the Sandyhook incident is increasing support for gun control as time goes by, dramatically so in just a little over a month.

Actually, the Fox News poll listed in the topic article that you provided lists overwhelming support for stricter gun laws in the US.

Here is a direct link to the Fox News poll, with these questions starting with question #34, and here are quotes where all realistic gun control initiatives in the US are supported by a majority of respondents.

According to the information from the poll in the article you linked that support is now also at 54% for the ban of so called assault weapons and semi-automatic weapons. The only initiative not supported by the majority of the demographic studied in the poll was arming school officials and teachers, which is of course is an expansion of access to guns not a gun control. restriction. This was the similar result listed in the overview of 9 polls in the link provided above from yahoo, and the Constitutional Daily.

There is no initiative in the US to confiscate guns, only paranoia of the potential of that happening, so it is pretty easy to answer yes in an anonymous poll that someone would defy the law, until their actual liberties, freedoms, and life could be at jeopardy, if there was actually a potential that people's guns would be legally confiscated, under a scenario like martial law, facing an actual consequence from defying the authority of law enforcement and/or military forces.

But. it makes a better headline in the "Dailycaller", than what is represented in the actual other questions in the poll that indicate that a majority of the country is now behind all the actual gun control initiatives that are realistically on the table for negotiation.

According to the meta analysis of polls provided by Yahoo and the Daily Constitutional about 50% of the country does have these paranoid concerns generated by right wing sources that the government is out to confiscate guns as an ultimate goal of gun control restrictions.

But, never the less, a majority of respondents over those 9 polls analyzed support all realistic gun control measures on the table for negotiation.

I was convinced that the ban of any gun for sale was not likely in December, but I am no longer convinced by these changing polls, changing public sentiment, and continued national reports of incidences in the national media since Sandyhook, that this necessarily is going to be the ultimate outcome of federal legislation, per a permanent ban on high capacity ammunition clips, so called assault weapons and other semi-automatic weapons in the US.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/interac ... n-control/

The NRA did what you want back in the early '90s during the drafting of the first assault weapon ban. It turned out to be a deal with the devil. Not only that, but it was never linked to any decrease in crime. The gun lobby refuses to "compromise" because there never is one final compromise. Eventually the gun control lobby will want a new "compromise" for their newest asinine standard of "common sense" schemes and will then accuse the gun lobby of being unreasonable. This will continue as long as the gun lobby plays along, so the gun lobby says "NO!" this time around to avoid being played for a sucker again!

They also did a story recently about 60 percent of people support letting illegal aliens stay, but the online poll was 77% opposed. This isn't 'shopped. I read the article and voted on it.


Also, those polls don't factor in how many respondents are competent enough with firearms to have any business trying to influence the laws. It's really not much different from how Obama got elected- a bunch of people that were clueless about how the system (or the world) works voted for the first time based on an emotionally driven impulse. We are a constitutional republic. Not a true democracy, which is a good thing because it helps create a safeguard against mob rule. The founding fathers wrote it with the intention of looking centuries into the future, knowing that democracies have a tendency to decay, in part from people making self-centered and impulsive decisions with their vote. Our constitution helps save said stupid people from their bad decisions that lead down the path to a dictatorship, so those media polls show nothing more than how overwhelmingly wise the founding fathers were to put such careful consideration into our constitution and add the 2nd amendment.

I wonder what percentage currently defy gun laws? I know I break them routinely because they are poorly constructed and impractical to comply with, though for obvious reasons I'm not going to get too specific. IIRC there are 22,000 gun laws on the books in this country, and I'm pretty sure I've broken plenty of them I wasn't even aware of, not that that makes much of a difference to me.

Those nine polls studied by the Constitutional Daily were not online polls, they were scientifically conducted polls, and the gallup poll is a highly respected poll that provided the 60% statistic in favor of banning so called assault weapons and other semi automatic weapons at levels higher than the 1994 ban. Again, the gallup poll is the same poll that provided the highest opposition to gun control in December among any scientifically done national poll at that time with support for the ban at only the 40 percentile range at that point in time, and support against an overall ban on handguns at close to 80%.

The opinion on an overall ban on the sale of handguns hasn't changed much in the US, because that is not reasonable and obviously unconstitutional. It is not unconstitutional to limit the sale of certain types of weapons neither at the state level or the federal level.

But there are questions associated with that concern on some of the other federal gun control initiatives, that might be challenged in the courts. That is the same way the process works for consideration of any other law proposed that is questionable per meeting constitutional law and the reason the judiciary branch of government exists, to get it sorted out, with judiciary opinions potentially changing over time, as the changing times warrant those changes, and the judiciary faces and opinions that go with them change as well, at every level of government over time.

Close to 80% of potential voters in the US are registered, and somewhere between 30 and 50% usually vote in elections. There is no assurance that anyone voting is going to have a good understanding about anything they are voting on. Nor is there that requirement for anyone; guns are far from a complicated issue compared to other political issues, but it is a very emotional issue for some people.

If the tide of national public opinion pulls strong enough for change those politicians that represent their constituents will either comply or eventually be replaced by someone else, as an emotional political issue like this can be a game changer for a political career. The same gallup poll also indicates that over 50% of households own guns, as high as it has been at any other historical period in recent decades.

But, on the other hand the so called "assault weapons" style of weapons is still a minority niche of gun owners of a scale of gun owners where a majority are neither looking to buy one or keep one, because they have no desire for either. The polls are bearing out that reality stronger as time goes by.

At this point there are no factors realistically or in theory that are likely going to slow the media sensitive incidences of shootings and the more concern that is shared as a result of those shootings, are going to create an incentive for a larger band-aid of fix, if some type of band-aid is not put into effect soon for at least an attempt of theory of action to generate a change in the frequency of nationally observed incidents.

The band-aid is coming sooner or later. It is inevitable at this point in time. The resistance to the smaller band-aids of the present by the NRA could eventually lead to larger band-aids in the future depending on the public's perception of what the eventual national wound looks like per these incidences of media sensitive shootings, for both gun owners and individuals that do not own guns, as there are already people that own guns that support limited bans on firearms.

The weakness of the NRA could eventually be the organization's resistance to any significant change of gun control along with it's staunchest supporters. Particularly if these media sensitive shooting continue to increase in severity and frequency, as the general public will be looking for someone to blame for the chaos of the reality of an almost unlimited number of factors that lead to these shootings.

The ultimate impact of that blame could be a larger band-aid of gun control restrictions. All of these conspiracy theories about Obama being a dictator and people getting their guns confiscated, and loss of constitutional rights is resulting in a potential long term loss of effective strategy for the NRA and a greater potential for stricter gun control regulations.

The fringe element of the tea party movement had a similar impact on any chance of a republican presidency not only this time, but potentially for decades to come. The most strategically long term effective action the NRA could do at this point in time is get behind all the reasonable gun control restrictions except for the actual ban of weapons, because if they work to prevent any change in gun control restrictions and are successful in the short term at that goal, the bigger changes are more likely to occur in the future. A similar tea party element, though, is their vulnerability that will not support any change. As with the second term of Obama, that may be part of the origin of the inevitable long term result.

That Small minority has grown over the years. It grew considerably in 2009 and again in the past 6 weeks.


Yes, well as we’ve learned in the past those smaller band aids always lead directly to bigger band-aids, anyway. The slippery slope of gun regulation is that when it doesn’t work, and it won’t, then more must be needed and when it doesn’t work even more is needed, etc…

Last edited by Raptor on 02 Feb 2013, 7:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.