American common sense is not, it would seem, completely dead after all:
Gun control is still going nowhere in Congress. And in fact, with every major mass shooting in America, gun-rights supporters seem to be digging in even further -- and bringing the rest of America along with them.
Former Texas governor Rick Perry, a 2016 GOP presidential candidate, argued after last week's deadly shooting at a Lafayette, Louisiana, movie theater that Americans should be allowed to bring guns into movie theaters - and everywhere else - to prevent such crime.
It's an echo of a familiar theme from NRA head Wayne LaPierre. "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," LaPierre said frequently amid the more recent gun-control debate.
And most Americans agree with this logic, according to a 2014 Pew Research Poll. Since the 2012 Newtown, Connecticut, massacre of twenty-six people, including twenty school children, the poll found a nine-point rise in the number of Americans who think gun ownership could "protect people from becoming victims of crime."
It's brutally simple logic: "Massacres" are cases of one or more armed people mowing down multiple unarmed, defenseless people; the same scenario where the unarmed, defenseless people are armed and capable of defending themselves is a "gun battle," and aside from the occasional biker gang war, the latter is a whole lot less frequent. I think we can assume that there is a very sound, rational reason for that. And most Americans are drawing that same sensible conclusion:
Gun control is, once again, one of the few domestic issues on which leftwingnut demagoguery has never succeeded in handing Democrats the upper hand. Which helps explain this blurb:
Why are U.S. congressmen reluctant to support gun control regulations....? We argue that re-election motives can lead politicians to take a pro-gun stance against the interests of an apathetic majority of the electorate, but in line with the interests of an intense minority.
Apparently not.
We develop a model of gun control choices in which incumbent politicians are both office and policy motivated, and voters differ in the direction and intensity of their preferences. We derive conditions under which politicians support gun control early in their terms, but oppose them when they approach re-election. We test the predictions of the model by analyzing votes on gun-related legislation in the U.S. Senate, in which one third of the members are up for re-election every two years. We find that senators are more likely to vote pro gun when they are close to facing re-election, a result which holds comparing both across and within legislators. Only Democrat senators “flip flop” on gun control, and only if the group of pro-gun voters in their constituency is of intermediate size.
And if gun rights support really only came from an "intense minority," don't you think Democrat senators and representatives wouldn't flip-flop? That they would run on what the "commonsense gun laws" majority allegedly wanted? But they don't, do they? I think we can assume that there is a very sound, rational reason for that. Just one that the National Bureau of Economic Research doesn't want to acknowledge.
And if all these shooting sprees in "gun-free zones" of the past few years are turning Americans more in favor of the Second Amendment rather than less....well, let's just say that if the Left is going to impose suffocating gun control on the country, they're going to have to do so.....honestly.
And that might prove....difficult.
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