New surveys confirm Americans want more gun control…even NRA members

The studies keep pouring in on gun control vs. gun rights and they keep saying the same thing.  The American public wants more gun regulations, and this includes members of the National Rifle Assn. (NRA).  The time has come for the gun rights fanatics like Wayne LaPierre, head of the NRA, to prove these studies bogus or admit defeat and get on with saving people’s lives with reasonable gun control laws.  LaPierre’s “absolutist” hogwash on gun owners’ rights under the 2^nd Amendment is long overdue for an overhaul, and wacky Wayne knows it; except he’s trying to save his cushy million dollar job.

In the most recent poll by Johns Hopkins University, “89 percent of all respondents, and 75 percent of those identified as NRA members, support universal background checks for gun sales.”  Now this would include private sales at gun shows where 40% of U.S. gun sales come from.  Since there were 10,800,000guns sold in 2011 in the U.S., that means that 4,320,000 of those firearms went on the street knowing absolutely nothing about the individual buying them.  He or she just walked in, made the purchase, and walked out the door with a means to kill someone.  That is scary as hell.

 

 

There’s more.  Close to “70 percent of respondents supported bans on military-style semiautomatic weapons and high capacity ammunition magazines,” and “80 percent  backed measures restricting those who could buy guns, such as people with histories of domestic violence or serious juvenile crimes.”  The sampling also checked to find out if there were any differences between gun owners and non-gun owners.  There weren’t, which shows a consistency throughout the U.S. that more gun regulations are needed.

The above becomes even more significant when you consider the fact that a large majority of NRA members are included.  This majority also would prohibit, “people with recent alcohol or drug charges to purchase guns, and 70 percent supported a mandatory minimum of 2 years in prison for selling guns to persons who are not legally allowed to have one.”  The survey also found that Americans want more spending on mental health in relation to gun violence.    

But that’s not all.  A new Gallup poll found that two-thirds of the American public support heavy new restrictions on gun purchases, supporting all nine of President Obama’s key proposals.  They were:

 

• 91% for criminal background checks
• 82% want increased government spending on mental health programs
• 79% are for increased government spending for law enforcement and school officials for armed attacks
• 75% think criminal penalties should be increased for those buying guns for someone who hasn't passed background check
• 70% want the feds  to spend $4 billion to help keep 15,000 police officers on the street
• 69% would like the government to spend $30 million to help schools develop emergency response plans
• 67% want to ban the possession of armor-piercing bullets by anyone other than the military or law enforcement
• 60% would strengthen the ban on assault weapons that expired in 2004
• 54% want to limit the sale of ammunition magazines to 10 rounds or less

 

In some additional findings the respondents opted for school security over new gun laws and “Seventy-five per cent favor increasing criminal penalties for so-called 'straw purchasers', people who buy guns for others restricted from having weapons of their own.”  You might recall that it was these straw buyers in Arizona, where gun control almost doesn’t exist, that purchased firearms that ended up in the hands of the Mexican drug cartels.  Arizona not only is still passing laws to relax gun control even more, but now the state’s legislature is presenting a bill that would allow Arizona to ignore new federal gun laws.

Finally let me leave you with the fact that there have been 1,280 gun deaths since the Sandy Hook Elementary School carnage, as reported by the Huff Post. 

Gun owners do not have a consummate right to own their weapons

In an opinion piece in the NY Times, Andrew Rosenthal said: “Even if you believe the Second Amendment grants each American an individual right to own a gun, which remains a matter of some debate, it does not follow logically, legally or constitutionally that this right is absolute. No right granted by the Constitution is totally exempt from limitations.”  The key word is absolute and refutes this claim by wacky Wayne LaPierre, head of the National Rifle Assn. (NRA).

Rosenthal continues by citing Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s 2008 comment that “offers to provide or requests to obtain child pornography are categorically excluded from the First Amendment.”  Rosenthal likens this thinking to the fact that it is also unreasonable to allow the purchase of semiautomatic rifles with 100-round magazines without even a background check.  Like at some gun shows by unlicensed dealers (the gun show loophole).

The carnage of this loophole is horrendous as evidenced by the recent mass shootings; see yesterday’s post.  Up to 40 percent of all private gun purchases at gun shows occur with no background check whatsoever, another absurd right the NRA protects like owning an assault rifle.  Bob Costas opened the media door to dialogue on this issue when he said emphatically that he believes we need more “comprehensive and more sensible gun control legislation.”  

But another gun rights activist wacko, David Kopel, said, following the murder-suicide by NFL player Jovan Belcher, that “there is no link between firearm availability and homicide.”  The conservative media followed suit with more false claims until Piers Morgan on CNN corrected this drivel with Harvard research stating, "states with higher levels of household gun ownership had higher rates of firearm homicide and overall homicide."

Morgan confronted Kopel that the United Kingdom has strong gun laws and a fraction of the gun homicides in the U.S.  Britain has 35 to 45 gun murders a year: America has 11 to 12 thousand.  Kopel wasn’t convinced.  The CNN host then cited Japan with the toughest gun control laws in the world and the fact that they have only 2 to 10 gun murders a year.  Harvard’s David Hemenway found firearm homicides in the U.S. 19.5 times higher than other high-income nations.

Kopel said Scotland was the most violent country in the world.  If this was supposed to relate to gun violence, the fact is that in 2009, there were two gun murders in Scotland, placing its rate at 0.04 per 100,000 people. In 2010, there were 11,078 gun homicides in the United States. Our per capita rate of 3.59 per 100,000 is nearly 90 times higher than Scotland's rate.  The numbers are stark yet the gun nuts continue to be completely clueless.

In an article in the New Yorker in early 2912, Jill Lepore says, “The modern gun debate began with a shooting. In 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald bought a bolt-action rifle—an Italian military-surplus weapon—for nineteen dollars and ninety-five cents by ordering it from an ad that he found in American Rifleman.”  Both junk mail and gun violence at their worst.  Legislation was introduced and passed to restrict mail-order sales of shotguns and rifles, agreeable then to the NRA.

That, of course, was before wacky Wayne LaPierre took over the NRA, after which it was downhill for gun control.  Until now.  LaPierre and his goons are on the run and it looks like there is no let up by the gun control advocates to push through new regulations on the ownership and use of guns.  The fiscal cliff issue has garnered the attention of the White House and Congress for now but that won’t last forever and then gun control will return to the forefront.