A funny thing happened on the way to the voting booth: Once again, the outcome of the presidential election failed to match up with the published polling on the issue of gun control.
Shortly after the results had been finalized, Gallup released a survey that purported to show that “majorities of Americans continue to favor stricter gun laws and an assault weapons ban in the U.S.” and that “56% of U.S. adults support stricter laws covering the sale of firearms in general.” Those numbers, Gallup concluded, have been “steady.”
But, if that were true, Americans sure have a funny way of showing it. In 2024, the public voted for a president who had declared himself to be a staunch defender of the Second Amendment. Voters also gave us majorities in both the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives that are strongly opposed to a ban on “assault weapons” and to other restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms.
Certainly, this was not because the topic was left alone. During the election, the Democratic candidate for president, Kamala Harris, repeatedly promised to make it harder to buy firearms, and explicitly vowed to prohibit “assault weapons.” Harris lost in what ended up being the worst performance from a Democrat since 1988.
What gives?
The first answer is that, as a general matter, polling is broken. Once again, President Donald Trump (R) did better than the models suggested he was going to do, and, once again, this was in large part because a significant number of Americans simply did not want to tell strangers that they intended to vote for him.
Given the way in which our elite class treats gun owners, it seems likely that this reticence extends to questions about gun control, too. A whole host of voters clearly do not want to answer, “Who are you voting for?” Also, a whole host of voters do not want to tell a stranger on the phone what they think of a ban on “assault weapons.”
Nor, I suspect, do most pollsters really want to know the answer. As psephologists know, polling can be utilized as a political weapon that, instead of echoing public opinion, can be craftily used to shape it.
The claim that the public is clamoring for stricter gun control but that politicians are ignoring that support is extremely important to the enemies of the Second Amendment, as they use the claim to empower themselves. When the topic is gun control, the media becomes indistinguishable from the activists whose aims it helps advance. One does not need to be a conspiracy theorist to wonder whether there exist any discernible incentives to fix polling that yields results of which its architects approve and desire.
Finally, Gallup and others suffer from what I tend to call the vagueness problem. As recent history shows, there is a considerable gap between what voters say that they want when answering carefully worded questions and what voters actually want when they are presented with the details of a concrete plan. “Assault weapon” is a deliberately misleading term that loses its efficacy once voters discover that it is a cynical euphemism for “the most commonly owned rifle in America.”
The same is true of “universal background checks,” “stricter gun laws,” “high-capacity magazines” and more. It is one thing for voters to say “Yes” to abstract promises to reduce crime; it is quite another for them to sign on to an initiative or proposed law when the blunt meanings of their terms have been revealed. The gun-control movement has spent years attempting to hide its true aims. It should come as no great surprise that, when its misleading language is repeated in polls, the results do not map properly onto the real world.
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