It's enough to send a serious gun regulation backer into despair. The more often the words "gun control" appear in headlines, the more often we hear about a
surge in gun sales. Since it's certain that no new gun regulations will result in the confiscation of firearms (rightwing lobbyists, talk radio hosts, and Washington demagogues are just lying when they start shrieking about "gun grabbers"), then rising gun sales would seem to mean that the effort to curb gun violence has resulted in
more guns on the street, not fewer. It's at this point that you begin to wonder if you aren't just doing more harm than good.
But what the "Booming Gun Sales!" stories fail to cover is who it is who's buying all these guns and ammo. And it turns out that this is a pretty important question -- as a new poll demonstrates not by showing who's buying them, but who isn't.
New York Times:
The gun ownership rate has fallen across a broad cross section of households since the early 1970s, according to data from the General Social Survey, a public opinion survey conducted every two years that asks a sample of American adults if they have guns at home, among other questions.
The rate has dropped in cities large and small, in suburbs and rural areas and in all regions of the country. It has fallen among households with children, and among those without. It has declined for households that say they are very happy, and for those that say they are not. It is down among churchgoers and those who never sit in pews.
The household gun ownership rate has fallen from an average of 50 percent in the 1970s to 49 percent in the 1980s, 43 percent in the 1990s and 35 percent in the 2000s, according to the survey data, analyzed by The New York Times...[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
