“We’re not gonna fix it,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) said.
Then there’s the other debate, the one that takes place among Americans in general. There, too, there’s not really much debate: Most Americans support a broad range of measures that would limit gun ownership. That’s true not only of Democrats, but also Republicans. It’s even true of people who live in households with guns.
The most recent measure of this reality comes in polling from Fox News. (A quick aside: While Fox News’s coverage and commentary has an obvious political bias, their polling has been consistently good. To the extent, in fact, that the network often seems to downplay their own unfavorable poll findings.) They presented respondents with a battery of possible measures that could reduce gun violence. Of the eight presented, a majority favored implementing seven of them.
The only one that didn’t have majority support? One that’s commonly proposed by Capitol Hill Republicans: increasing the number of people carrying firearms for defense.
There are a number of aspects of those results that are worth highlighting. Among them:
- Residents of households that have guns are generally more supportive of new restrictions than are Republicans. That’s in part because some of those residents are probably Democrats, but it’s still striking.
- At least two-thirds of Republicans support universal criminal background checks, a minimum age of 21, a 30-day waiting period, red-flag laws and mental health checks on gun buyers. Each of those gets more support than simply encouraging more people to carry guns.
- Democrats are more likely than Republicans to support better enforcement of existing gun laws, though that, too, has often been a default response to proposed restrictions by congressional Republicans.
- The least popular proposal among Republicans — a ban on assault rifles and semiautomatic weapons — is also one that was essentially in effect 20 years ago.
These numbers fluctuate to some extent, and it’s easier to express support for legislation in the abstract than for specific bills. The devil is in the details and all that.
But the Fox News poll highlights the stark difference between the willingness of Americans in general to implement new legislation aimed at limiting gun violence and the willingness of their elected representatives to do so.
