A healthy antidote to the histrionic rantings of propagandized and beguiled students flooding the Washington Mall on Saturday was released on Thursday. The NBC News/Wall Street Journal Survey found that the average American has an increasingly favorable view of the legal possession and use of firearms when it comes to self-defense. The polling results were based on questioning 1,100 adults, in contrast to the adult-manipulated adolescents who participated in what amounted to a day-long temper tantrum.
The key questions asked were: “A: Gun ownership does more to increase safety by allowing law-abiding citizens to protect themselves.” Or “B: Gun ownership does more to reduce safety by giving too many people access to firearms and increasing the chances for accidental misuse.”
Not only did 58 percent — nearly six out of every ten of those polled — answer “A”, those choosing that same question seventeen years ago was just 41 percent. Those holding for “B” by contrast, was just 38 percent, down from 52 percent in 1999.
For those of us who understand the importance of gun rights, the news gets better. When those polled were asked “Do you, or does anyone in your household, own a gun of any kind?” 47 percent said “yes,” up from 39 percent in 2011.
These findings represent a massive and favorable reversal from 1999 both in firearm favorability and in actual ownership of firearms for self-defense. Guy Benson, the political editor for Townhall.com and conservative radio show host, concluded that, despite the efforts of anti-gunners as evidenced by their successful recruiting of “useful idiots” for their purposes on Saturday, “they’re losing the fundamental debate about guns.”
The poll results, according to Benson, also clearly demark the division between far-left Democrats and the rest of America:
Nearly six-in-ten Americans currently say that owning a gun for self-defense increases one’s safety. Heading into the 21st century, a majority of Americans believed the opposite. That’s a big swing. And tens of millions of people have put this belief into practice, with nearly half of all US adults reporting that “they have a firearm in [their] household.”…
Less than one-third of Democrats agree with the new American consensus on this issue, placing the country’s left political flank far out of step with everyone else. Close to 90 percent of Republicans take the opposite view, as do roughly two-thirds of independents. [Emphasis in original.]
These results contrast sharply with the noisy support being given the adolescent rabble occupying the Washington Mall by the left-wing media on Saturday. As Kevin McCullough, also at Townhall.com, noted:
They have little more than a junior high level of education under their belt. The political left, driven by a leftist media, and financed by uber-rich and hard-left celebrities are willing to use them, and to continue to use them to advance their socialist utopia ideals. (One of the primary ideas of which has always included disarming the masses.)
Thursday’s poll results illustrate that real favorable cultural change towards common sense is occurring, despite the anti-gun lobby’s subversive scheming to ultimately disarm the civilian population. The poll is a welcome antidote to the media’s seemingly endless coverage of the “March for Our Lives” demonstrations that took place over the weekend.
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An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
