What should really worry Democrats, however, is that the decrease in the Gallup poll was largely driven by a 15-point drop among independents. And it is always the case that when Democrats win elections - the kind of people who will nominate a notorious anti–Second Amendment activist to head up the ATF - anxiety among gun owners grows. The defund-the-police movement - which a number of mainstream Democrats, caught up in the moment, flirted with - and rising homicide rates didn’t help, either. Indeed, not an insignificant number of Americans were likely dismayed as officials allowed rioters to take over sections of major cities in the summer of 2020. There have been other gun-buying surges in American history, in the 1950s for instance, but the new gun owner isn’t buying hunting rifles, but semiauto handguns for personal protection. And the pace hasn’t slowed (with many people using their stimulus checks to stock up on new weapons). Without gun shortages, that numbers would likely have been significantly higher. Women accounted for somewhere around 40 percent of those people. In 2020, there were 8.4 million first-time gun buyers. Some of this movement is almost surely attributable to the fact that we’re in the middle of the greatest expansion of gun ownership in American history. And imagine what those polls would look like if more Americans understood that the vast majority of gun owners do go through background checks? In 2020, there was seven-point drop and another five-point one this year. In 1990, the percentage that supported stricter laws was 78 percent. For context: After the Parkland school shooting in 2018, support for gun control hit its highest level since 1993 at 67 percent. A new Gallup poll finds that American support for “stricter gun control” has fallen to 52 percent, the lowest it’s been since 2014. Polls that gauge support for “gun control” measures are imperfect, but long-term surveys do offer some useful insight into trends. A person shops for a handgun at Frontier Arms & Supply gun shop in Cheyenne, Wyo., March 18, 2020.

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