A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll of 1,200 voters asked which issues they considered important enough to have an effect on how they voted in an election, intentionally leaving out a few nearly universal concerns like foreign policy and the economy. The greatest number of respondents picked “gun rights or gun control” as the issue most important to them.
Some 35 percent of respondents listed guns as their top issue, beating out other hot-button topics like immigration and abortion. As NRA-ILA explains, the poll did not distinguish in this question between pro- and anti-gun positions, yet in another question asking whether the government did too much or too little to restrict access to firearms, the greater number of respondents said there was already too much regulation.
In total, 48 percent of respondents also responded affirmatively to the question, “Do you, or does anyone in your household, own a gun of any kind?” This number is higher than what appeared in past versions of the same poll. Good news, then: Evidence indicates that the American voting populace is not only embracing guns in greater numbers, but many of them are also fiercely committed to defending the Second Amendment.