by Joseph P. Tartaro | Executive Editor
Has the American public grown sick of the continuing gun debate? The anti-gunners had planned to make a big public showing on the anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre on Dec. 14.
Pro-gunners were prepared to respond. And the general media was geared up to get a lot of mileage over whatever public events took place.
But the day came and passed with a minimum of media hoopla. You may not even have noticed gun issue articles in your local fish-wrapper, or on TV news programs, or even on the Internet.
Sure, some of newspapers and wire services scheduled and even ran gun-debate op-eds and staff think pieces, but considering what people like outgoing New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his Mayors Against Illegal Guns had originally planned, the anniversary was a nonevent.
Not in Newtown, CT, of course.
The people of Newtown just wanted to be left alone. They didn’t want anybody to desecrate the memory of their lost loved ones—children and teachers— by turning the anniversary into a public event. Town leaders even ruled out any major commemorations by local citizens.
The people of Newtown wanted to be left alone in their remembrances and grief.
They had quiet candlelight vigils and they shared their pain as privately as they could. With dignity and respect for their lost loved ones, friends and neighbors.
Ever since the horrible tragedy eleven days before Christmas 2012, all kinds of politicians, from the president of the United States down to the local dog catcher, were using the tragedy as a soap box for their own agenda.
They had hoped to build public support for gun control policies that really had nothing to do with Sandy Hook, or Aurora, CO, or any other event. Nothing anyone has yet proposed could have prevented such events.
Consider for a moment the recent shooting at Los Angeles International Airport. If all the security that national, state and local agencies provided could not prevent the LAX shooting, just a few weeks ago, what were the anti-gunners talking about? Maximum security didn’t prevent it, and couldn’t have. We are dealing with events that are totally beyond our own imaginations, and even those of the best security brains around.
The people of Newtown wanted to be left alone, and for the most part they were, although a few news hounds were ready for any big story that broke. But no such story happened.
And even the school shotgunshooting incident in Colorado the day before the Sandy Hook anniversary didn’t do anything to fire up the antigun bombast.
Nothing in Colorado’s new gun laws could have prevented what happened there, except that when the disturbed young shooter realized he was going to be faced by a good guy armed with a gun, he took his own life.
To a great extent, the security in that school worked. It prevented the situation from escalating into another Sandy Hook. Ever since the Columbine shooting years ago, police and security experts have been revising their strategies for responding to such active shooter events.
Maybe, if we damp down some of the political rhetoric and public posturing over the gun issue and spend some time on intelligent dialogue with people who might know what they’re doing, we might learn how to respond to such aberrations.
The gun debate has been going on in this country for well over 50 years, and so far—despite hundreds, even thousands of new legislative schemes and laws passed, nothing has really changed, except perhaps the public’s interest in what either side has to say.
The president, vice president and a host of other officials promised an intelligent, open-ended debate on the subject right after the Sand Hook shootings, but no such genuine debate or discussion has taken place almost a year later. At this point, I’m doubtful if it ever will.
And, apparently, I’m not alone.
Perhaps that is why opinion pollsters may find it hard to track the public pulse, or why that pulse is changing.
In early December, CNN—always a strong supporter of the anti-gun agenda—opened a report on a new poll with sort of shrug.
“As memories fade from last December’s horrific school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, a new national poll indicates that support for stricter gun control laws appears to be fading, too,” said CNN.
According to a new CNN/ORC International survey announced at the beginning of December, 49% of Americans say they support stricter gun control laws, with 50% opposed. The 49% support is down six percentage points from the 55% who said they backed stricter gun control in CNN polling from January 2013, just a few weeks after the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
The survey indicates that the intensity of opinion on the issue of gun control, once an advantage for guncontrol advocates, no longer benefits either side. In January, 37% of all Americans strongly favored stricter gun laws, with 27% strongly opposed to them. Now that 10-point difference has completely disappeared, with the number who strongly oppose and strongly favor stricter gun control at essentially the same level.
CNN added some journalistic niceties to its reports, noting that “according to the poll, geography plays a role in the fading support for gun control.
“Demographically speaking, the drop in support for stricter gun laws is mostly based on where people live, with a 10-point decline in the Midwest and a 15-point drop in urban areas having a lot to do with the overall decline nationally,” CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said.
“Two-thirds of people who live in big cities supported stricter gun control laws in the weeks following Newtown; now that figure is down to a bare majority. And while support for new gun laws is down in all regions of the country, it has fallen further in the Midwest,” Holland added.
The poll indicates that majorities in the Northeast and the West still favor stricter gun control, but majorities in the South and Midwest now oppose it.” Bottom line for the CNN/ORC poll is that “support for gun control has waxed and waned.” But that’s the way with polling numbers. They change from day to day. But certainly, the public seems to be tuned out for now.
