Look anywhere in this nation born of a bloody revolution of musket fire, and you’re likely to find sharp disagreement over guns.
Democrats war with Republicans; small towns are pitted against cities. Women and men are at odds, as are blacks and whites and old and young. North clashes with South, East with West.
“The current gun debate is more polarized and sour than any time before in American history,” said Adam Winkler, a constitutional law professor at UCLA and author of the 2011 book, Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America.
Still numb from the latest mass shooting, in Orlando, it’s easy to imagine that guns have always divided us this way. But a close look at survey data over decades shows they haven’t.
There was a time when most citizens favored banning handguns, the chief gun lobbyists supported firearm restrictions, and courts hadn’t yet interpreted the Second Amendment as guaranteeing a personal right to bear arms for self-defense at home.
Today, in a country of hundreds of millions of guns, public opinion and interpretation of the law have shifted so much that outright gun bans are unthinkable. It’s true that large segments of the public have expressed support for some aspects of gun regulation – but when Americans have been asked to say which is more important, gun control or gun rights, they trend toward the latter.
That shift has come, perhaps surprisingly, as fewer Americans today choose to keep a gun in their home. The General Social Survey by NORC at the University of Chicago – one of the foremost authorities on gun ownership – found 31 percent of households had guns in 2014, down from a high of 50.4 percent in 1977.