By Joseph P. Tartaro | Executive Editor
Sometimes as a gun owner you may think that you are not getting through to elected officials. In part, that may be true in relation to where you live. In some states, gun owners are only a tiny portion of the total population, in others, gun owners are even in the majority.
I’ve never been to Wyoming, but a recent book by C.J. Box set in Wyoming (The Disappeared) makes the point several times that in that state “everybody owns at least one gun,” and most times several. On the other side of the coin, in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey or California, gun owning Americans are in a mnority.
Needless to say, the politicians from the four mentioned states are pretty much always anti-gun, which explains the attitudes and voting records of people like Sens. Edward Markey (D-MA), Charles Schumer (D-NY), Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Diane Feinstein (D-CA). Their colleagues from the same states are also against gun owners and gun ownership.
The fact that they are also Democrats is also a reflection of the electorate and popular wisdom of their home state constituencies. Whenever you have a Democrat—in the Senate or House of Representatives—who does vote pro-gun at least part of the time, they will come from states such as Alabama, Nebraska, Pennsylvania or the Dakotas where the voters include large number of hunters and shooters.
In short, the people who win elections are a litmus test for the constituents they represent.
However, that does not mean that all Republicans are pro-gun, just that they tend to come from states like Wyoming, where gun ownership and hunting license sales are high,
Nor does it mean that gun rights activists are facing a stacked deck.
Two articles in this issue of TheGunMag are instructive.
One is the report from Scott Rasmussen on Page 25 that most Americans are not into politics as much as many in the media suggest. His observations based on an analysis of a number of surveys concludes that a majority of Americans—61 percent— are ideologically moderate, that a smaller majority—54 percent—are not concerned with the wall-to-wall political news obsession of CNN and other cable news outlets.
Rasmussen says:
“These voters aren’t fans of the president’s; just 29 percent approve of the job he’s doing, and only 19 percent believe he is a good role model. But 45 percent believe he is at least as ethical as most politicians.
“Their top concerns revolve around economic issues (32 percent), health care (22 percent), social issues (18 percent) and security issues (10 percent).
Whatever their top concern is, however, 53 percent don’t have confidence in one major party or the other to address it. And they’re not connecting the concerns to the political process. Seventy-three percent talk about politics with family and friends less than once a week.
“Much of the discord in the political process today stems from the inability of the politically obsessed to understand the majority of Americans who don’t fit the dominant political narrative. Often, it seems as if the politically engaged don’t even want to understand the rest of the country.”
Rasmussen’s analysis was based on a survey of the results of 15 separate voter surveys.
Significantly, a report of another study included on Page 17 of this issue helps explain the political power that gun owning voters wield even when it appears the cards are stacked against them.
The study recently released by researchers at the University of Kansas concludes that gun owners are more likely to vote than non-gunowners.
The reason: today’s gun owner is more likely than a gun owner in the 1970s to think of political engagement as an extension of Second Amendment rights, according to the study.
“This modern gun owner identity includes a conception of gun owners as people who take direct action to ensure their beliefs match behavior,” write the study’s authors. “Thus, the gun-owner’s self-mobilization makes her (or him) more likely to participate in all forms of politics.”
They report also that gun owners as sub-strata of the total US population are more like to vote, to contact their representatives, to right letter to the editor and otherwise engage in the total political process.
The Kansas University study, which uses survey data from a nonpartisan research group at the University of Chicago, does not include voting records from the 2016 presidential election, and therefore does not account for mobilization efforts by gun control organizations.
This snapshot study shows that in the 2012 election, 72 percent of gun owners voted, compared to 61 percent of non-gun owners, a difference of 11 percentage points. The gap has widened from 1972, when the voting margin of gun owners over non-gun owners was 2 percentage points.
The study’s authors say politically engaged gun owners, more than the NRA or other pro-gun organizations, explain why federal gun laws in the United States have remained the same in the wake of anti-gun activism in the wake of recent mass shootings.
“We do not dispute the significant influence of gun rights groups in American politics, yet we contend that gun owners as a sub-population…have developed a distinct social identity around gun ownership,” the study says. “[A]nd as a function of this identity, (they) are mobilized to participate in politics more often and through a variety of forms.”
The study analyzed perceptions of gun owners as a distinct minority in America, and divvied the population into three groups regardless of political party affiliation: avowed gunowners, those who said they lived in a household with guns, and those who do not own guns.
“But we think there’s something else going on,” one researcher added. “As these gun issues are becoming more salient, gun owners have developed a unique, distinct political identity around being a gun owner.”
The profile of a typical gun owner has also shifted over the last 30 years, according to the study. In the 1980s, more than 60 percent of gun owners said they owned firearms for hunting and 25 percent said they owned guns for protection, according to the Pew Research Center. Today, two-thirds of gun owners say they own guns for protection and less than 40 percent cite hunting as a reason for owning a firearm.
In other words, gun owner grassroots action may be the key to political protection of gun rights.
