Posted on 03/18/2013 4:59:07 PM PDT by neverdem
News that the share of American homes with guns has been declining for four decades is best seen as a wake-up call to those who believe in the original principles of the American compact. The New York Times is fronting the news based on data from the General Social Survey, which is a data collection operation based at the Chicago University. The Times analysis of its data suggests that gun ownership has, as the Times puts it, fallen across a broad cross section of households since the early 1970s in cities and rural areas and all regions of the country. What it calls the household gun ownership rate has plunged to 34% in 2012 from more than 50% in the 1970s.
This plunge is a shocking and dangerous development in a nation whose system of government was framed on an understanding that widespread, private gun ownership was one of the struts of liberty. The dispatch in the Times, a shrewdly crafted scoop, notes that the findings contrast with the impression left by a flurry of news reports about people rushing to buy guns and clearing shop shelves of assault rifles after the massacre last year at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn. It reckons the declining ownership rate suggests that even as the conversation on guns remains contentious...
--snip--
In any event, the Times reports that the trend raises questions about the future politics of gun control. The way it poses the question is this: Will efforts to regulate guns eventually meet with less resistance if they are increasingly concentrated in fewer hands or more resistance? By our lights its a good question, one that invites a reconsideration of the strategy being pursued by those of us who believe that the Second Amendment is the palladium of our liberty...
(Excerpt) Read more at nysun.com ...
BS meter alert!
Maybe gun owners are just less inclined to tell people what they own.
Despite the 70 million background checks since Obama took power, gun ownership is declining. I blame boating accidents.
Nonsense, everyone knows about the rash of canoe incidents involving guns are on the rise.
i believe the stats are ncorrect, or people gave false answers.
HA! HA! What a joke.
People reporting they have guns to idiot poll takers have declined.
Either that or, possibly, the ones the “may” have guns got a whole lot more than they used to have. I mean really? Since hussein was immaculated, background checks have topped 65 million. That’s a lot of firepower. Maybe.
We have had record guns sale since Obama has been elected. I personally know at least 20 people who have purchased a gun, most have bought multiple guns, who never had guns before. Most of these suburbanites come from families who haven’t owned guns in a couple of generations.
This is total BS anti-gun propaganda. The only place where gun ownership is declining is in the states that illegally ban law-abiding citizens from owning them.
“...gun owners are just less inclined to tell people what they own....”
Ding! Ding! Ding! Folks, we have a winner!
And just who is it who wants to know, most of the time? Some anonymous pollster at the other end of an intrusive dinnertime phone call, that’s who!
When asked, reply, “Who wants to know and why?”
The 5 million sales in the last few months will help resupply those that disappeared.
You too? My dad’s and mine and the rest of the family’s firearms were lost when our boat capsized. Picnic lunch too!
A pollster would never reach me. I have special ring tones for family and friends. Anyone else can leave a message.
This is why the media can never be trusted. they produce this trash to push their desire. They WANT it to be so thus they print or INVENT that it is so to invent perception...one of the most dangerous times in our nation is right now and it is a reason like this that makes it so dangerous.
The one gun I have left after a tragic tornado accident (we have no surface water near here) is inclining, rather than declining. If your gun declines, you are liable to shoot yourself or somebody else in the foot.
“Br’er Fox, he lay low...”
If guns are “declining”, why are the commie buffoons on Capitol Hill working so hard to start confiscating them?
Probably for the best if you had a Big Gulp in there.
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