According to Gallup’s latest polling, support for a handgun ban has fallen to just 20 percent and support for an “assault weapons” ban has cratered to just 52 percent.
Gun bans were a constant call from both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris over the last four years.
President Biden often combined the call with dubious factual, legal, and historical arguments.
Jonathan Turley previously wrote about the failure of politicians to acknowledge the limits posed by the Second Amendment and controlling case law. While there are good-faith objections to how the Second Amendment has been interpreted, the current case law makes such bans very difficult to defend.
In 2008, the Supreme Court handed down a landmark ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller, recognizing the Second Amendment as encompassing an individual right to bear arms.
Yet, the 2024 campaign showed a belated recognition that the Administration has failed to galvanize public opinion in support of gun limits and bans.
Harris came under fire during the campaign when she suddenly seemed to embrace one of the very guns that she previously vilified as it became clear that she was too far left from much of the country.
Years ago, Turley wrote that the rise in gun ownership in the United States, including among minority gun owners, was strikingly out of sync with the Democratic talking point.
In 2019, support for an assault weapons ban stood at 61%. It is now barely at a majority.
The drop in support for a handgun ban is notable in that only 33 percent of Democrats support such a ban.
The rise in gun ownership and the drop in polling raise another issue where Democratic candidates seem to be speaking to an increasingly empty room. The gun ownership rates are a problem for the party because most political issues do not involve a large personal investment by citizens. When someone becomes a gun owner, they spend hundreds of dollars on the weapon, ammunition, and other costs. The ban campaigns become more of a personal and financial issue for them.
Harris’s attempt to appeal to gun owners fell flat after years of calling for limits and bans.
The question is whether the party is ready to pivot on this and other issues — and whether it can given its political base.
That 33 percent is the core voting block in primaries even as the rest of the country moves toward the center of the political spectrum.
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