Hillary Clinton

Over the last few weeks the Democratic candidates have been laying out their proposals for new gun control legislation. The general consensus is that Hillary Clinton has been using gun control as a way to get to the left of Bernie Sanders, a candidate already so far to the left that Ben Carson might need to start looking out. The common refrain from gun control activists is that “90% of Americans want more gun control” and “the NRA doesn’t represent Americans,” and yet a brand new poll from CNN (not exactly the most gun friendly news network out there) shows that in reality the majority of Americans don’t want a single additional law on the books.

From CNN:

Nearly three weeks after the latest mass shooting claimed the lives of nine people, 52% of Americans now oppose stricter gun control laws, 6% more than the 46% of Americans who support such laws. That’s a wider gap than in June when CNN last surveyed Americans on gun control, finding that the public was equally split at 49% on the issue.

The advantage of those opposed to stricter gun control laws over those in favor is outside of the poll’s 3-point margin of error.

As Robert outlined earlier today, gun control polls well with groups that typically vote for Democratic candidates. The strategy might result in a win for Hillary in the primary, but when it comes to the general election these statements are going to come back to haunt her. The majority of Americans do not, in fact, want any additional gun control. And they definitely don’t appreciate being labeled “the enemy” by someone trying to get their vote.

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43 COMMENTS

  2. The freaks come out at night (around election time) sadly the POS gun-grabbers are full-time/unionized army of evil (D) hell bent on a civil war. Conduct yourselves accordingly.

  4. “CNN … not the most gun friendly network…”, I think is an understandment. They’ve certainly been trying to drive news on the anti-gun front.

    I think Nick is right though. HRC’s tacking left for the primary may prevail over Bernie, but she’s going to pay for it during the general for the enemies and vitrol she spewed.

    • I don’t know why she’s worried about sanders, he only has one position (make rich people pay for it!). Political ideologies aside, Clinton is, objectively speaking, the better candidate

      • Bernie is a thorn in her side, who not only is driving her off her game and making her work for the nomination, he’s deepening the divide among the Dems between the moderates and Warren left. HRC can talk the far left talk, but it’s not where she’s or her big money liberal backers are comfortable going. She can go too far off the reservation on Wall Street or old Dem money, before they will reign her in. Clinton Inc is only as strong as its contributors make it, and that is completely depedent on the access contributions buy…same old Clinton program. She’s going to have to carefully tack back to center.

        • sorry..meant to say can’t go too far off res. Should she become pres, I do fully expect her to push for an AWB and all the other BS. She fully recognizes that as long as the GOP solidly holds one chamber, that most likely won’t happen, but she can go through the motions for the theatrical points, fully knowing it won’t go anywhere.

  5. Personally I think the 53% is low. If we consider all the new firearm purchases in the last 6 years or so America is tooling up. I just don’t think we’re honest on polls. I know before the odd series of boating accidents, back when I was a gun owner I didn’t mention it much.

  6. I have come to the conclusion that with timing, demographics, couching leading questions, and juggling statistics, that any answer you are looking for can be acheived with these polls.

      • A friend of mine, going back to elementary school days, used to provide such polling services to clients who paid him well for such services. As he explained things to me, every effort possible was made to “interpret” the data in a way that reflected the client’s desired results.

        It is, after all, only “good business” to give the customer what he wants.

    • Which is true and interesting that CNN still failed to get the response they were looking for.

      I really hope that Hillary gets the nomination. Sanders is enough of a FUDD’s FUDD to possibly turn some single issue pro-gun voters back to their traditional party preferences.

      Now all that’s left is for the GOP to come up with a strong and popular candidate. Much as we may mock him, Trump has a very solid chance with low information “cult of personality” voters that generally swing elections. If he can get a good running mate to bring out the party faithful, he could get us something we have not seen for years. Full GOP control of the Congress and the White House. While that may not be the pro-gun victory we would hope for (Cruz is a much stronger pro-gun candidate), it would allow us to stack the SCotUS and possibly dial back a few of the absurdities of the Obama regime.

      • “Trump has a very solid chance with low information “cult of personality” voters that generally swing elections.”

        I hate to agree (because it’s Trump) but “so much win you’ll get sick of winning” is probably exactly the right messaging level for the masses.
        Anything more involved makes their eyes glaze over while they reach for the remote to make it stop.

        “Number 1: We’ve got this guy Not Sure.
        Number 2: He’s got a higher IQ than ANY MAN ALIVE. and Number 3: He’s going to fix EVERYTHING.”

        • The sort that elected Obama? Nobody really believes Trump, but he’s not a Clinton or a Bush, which gives him huge appeal….

        • I think at this point in the conversation, it’s more important to get A Republican into the White House than the RIGHT Republican.

      • It’s early, and Hillary still has a criminal investigation hanging over her head. But now with Biden out, she’s way ahead in the polls. I can’t believe it, but it looks like she might weather this to get the nomination. Same with Trump (way ahead in the polls). If Trump gets the nomination, I hope he spends some time beefing up on various issues, especially foreign affairs. He seems capable to loosing debates to Hillary, and he seems capable of getting down in the mud with her. Who knows, maybe down in the mud is where this will be fought, and maybe Trump can beat her there. But down in the mud is where Dems are in their element, and it’s never a good idea to let your opponent pick the field of play.

        I’d much rather see Ted Cruz chew her up and spit her out on the debate floor, never once raising his voice, never once letting her twist the conversation, never once losing that smile. He’s done it to far better minds than Hillary, without ever breaking a sweat. But if the primary voters want Trump, Trump is what we get. At least he is an American (on our side), which is more than can be said of anyone left in the Democratic pool of candidates.

      • Fudd isn’t an acronym, and you look like an idiot every time you insist on treating it as such.

    • A legit researcher will do whatever they can to minimize bias in the results so the study will be as valid as possible.

      A hack will cherry-pick respondents, timing, geographic area, etc to build results in their favor.

      100% of Americans will support more laws.

      You know, if you only poll vegan women in San Francisco 8 hours after a tragic school shooting.

      • True, which is why you need to scrutinize their methods carefully. I would think most professional pollsters would want to play it straight, given that their reputation depends on accuracy. But all too often polls these days are designed to persuade rather than predict.

        • As you said, “Their reputation depends on accuracy”, but their continued employment by clients depends on producing the results desired by those paying customers.

  7. I and my family and friends who are strong 2nd Amendment supporters will not even consider a candidate that has a history of gun control in their resume. We do our best to educate other family members and friends about the NRA and the lies perpetuated by the left. I believe teaching people the truth and taking them out to a shooting range are the best ways to get more and more supporters on our side. Once they have been made aware of the lefts lies, have been taught gun safety and proper handling they form their own opinions as far as who is being truthful and who are playing on their emotions.

  8. “The majority of Americans do not, in fact, want any additional gun control. And they definitely don’t appreciate being labeled “the enemy” by someone trying to get their vote.”

    Social movements like gun control succeed or fail on their ability to seize and maintain a consistent moral imperative. In this, the gun-control movement has been persistently unsuccessful. I first observed this a number of years ago during another of gun control’s well orchestrated attempts to gain public support for more anti-gun legislation. Instead of being successful, what I noticed happening was that the NRA’s membership began sharply increasing. When I called and attempted to join, for instance, I found that the NRA’s phone registration system was overwhelmed by new people calling to join. I never did get registered and, all the while, the NRA’s membership increased by several million.

    After the Sandy Hook tragedy you could see the gun controllers were happily anticipating their final victory over gun-rights . . . until Wayne LaPierre made his famous “good guy with a gun comment” which completely derailed the gun-controller’s best laid efforts. At its core, the gun-controller’s essential belief is that decent citizens should willingly allow themselves to be victims. Put another way, they’re telling us that perpetual victimhood in the interest of a greater good is preferable to the right to self-defense. Viewed in the abstract there are people who kinda-sorta buy into this. . .until they are forced to realize that spree-killers intentionally chose “gun-free zones” because they know their chances of meeting armed opposition are virtually nill. When something like that happens, or when we see videos of armed citizens defending themselves in Israel, it’s hard to mount a good case against the right of self-defense. It’s not too surprising that the NRA counts the gun-control movement as one of it best new member recruiting tools.

  9. Wait, what? A CNN poll showed this? No way…

    If the Dems play by the book, they’ll bray and whine about guns and all sorts of cockamamie schemes regarding them until the primaries are over. Whomever gets the nod will have to soften their tone a bit to get some key swing votes.

    Same on the Republican side, for different issues. Trump or whomever edges out in front for the Republicans will have to make some conciliatory gestures on immigration to get those swing votes.

  10. they definitely don’t appreciate being labeled “the enemy”

    But we are Hillary’s enemy. She hates us, and I’m proud of it.

    • Amen to that. I am proud to be a member of that “vast right-wing conspiracy” that was out to get her husband, BJ Clinton.

  11. The only people that oppose GC are ignorant of the realities of life and the history of our great nation.

  12. Its because the majority (the unwashed) doesn’t want it that makes them REALLY want it. Inverse relationship.

  13. Let the Democrats shoot themselves in the foot screaming more lies and old disinformation.
    If the FBI asks the right questions of their current front runner. It wont amount to a hill of beans what they say about 90% of Americans wanting more gun control. A possible jail cell awaits.
    Just read the full Gallop Pole out today its posted here too.

  14. This is a largely meaningless poll, because it asks a very generic question – the exact wording is, “Do you favor or oppose stricter gun control laws?”. The problem with that wording is that most people have no clue about what those laws even are. Many think that universal background checks are already in effect, for example.

    Also, when faced with generic questions like that, people generally tend to snap to the party line very quick (because they recognize the familiar wording that they’ve seen before in the propaganda coming from their side, and their brain instantly regurgitates and unloads what they’ve been fed on the subject).

    If you want meaningful answers, you ask specific questions about specific gun control measures, and not in a “more than now” sense, but absolute – e.g. “Do you think that all gun transfers should require a background check?”, or “Do you think that magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition should be banned?”, or “Do you think that semi-automatic firearms should be banned?”. And then you aggregate the answers and compare them to the status quo, and you know what the public will actually support.

    It’s a lot like Obamacare – if you remember, back in the day they also ran generic polls with a single “do you support it?” question that were pretty much split along the party lines. But when someone instead removed all references to ACA in the questions, and asked things on specific policies that ACA consists of, such as “Would you support a law that would legally ban health insurance providers from refusing coverage based on pre-existing conditions”, then they could actually see which parts were popular and which weren’t (hint: that one was very popular), but more importantly, when they aggregated all of them, turned out that there was actually broad support for ACA, even among Republicans. You just had to avoid using the words “ACA” and “Obamacare” to ask about it.

    Or here’s yet another example. If you go around and ask Americans if they want the wealth distribution in USA to be like that in Sweden, you have most Democrats saying “yes”, and most Republicans saying “no”, as you’d expect. But if instead you present them with several distribution graphs (without labeling any real countries they correspond to), and ask to pick the one that they think is best, then 92% will pick the actual graph for Sweden – including most Republicans. Here’s the study:
    http://www.people.hbs.edu/mnorton/norton%20ariely%20in%20press.pdf

    This just goes to show why PR is important. The label on the cover is often more important than the message, and the message can be discarded without even being heard based on the label alone.

  15. Why aren’t all the commonsense gun regulation groups like Moms Demand Action and Coalition to Stop Gun Violence calling out Hillary Clinton on her extreme views. After all they do support the second amendment and don’t want to ban guns. They just want simple commonsense laws put in place that 97.648% of Americans agree with.

  16. Hopefully, something will fang Hilary in the hindquarters and turn Mr. & Mrs. America against her before November 2016, and if it’s her statements against the NRA, gun rights, or gun owners, so much the better. Even Joe Biden in his swan song message took a swipe at Hilary’s invective against her “enemies”.

  17. I just want to know if anyone will be surprised if we have any suspiciously timed ‘incidents’ nearer to the election?

  18. How about liberal control? They are out killing more babies and poor people than any other group.

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