When polled individually, all three of the President's primary gun control measures have majority support. The assault weapons ban has the smallest mandate, but most polls still show a clear majority of 55% or more support it. When it comes to reducing high-capacity magazines and especially universal background checks, a decisive majority favors the President's position. Yet when poll respondents are asked generally about their feelings on additional gun control measures, support is much softer and appears to be declining as more time passes since Newtown. So what's with the confused public response?
There are undoubtedly a number of factors, with the biggest being that the term "gun control" seems to quickly divide Americans along tribal lines. But I think another association is at work here that makes so many people reluctant to divest themselves to the cause of gun control, and that's the sense that the people pushing for new laws see the current fight as the first of many steps to reach their full objective, which is the disarming of the public. Obviously the hard-core gun fetishists believe this, but I think plenty of people less invested in the gun culture also quietly fear the proverbial "slippery slope" to complete loss of freedom. And particularly with the cause's new leader, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, at the forefront of pushing for more gun restrictions, it becomes harder to make a good-faith case that the same kind of incrementalism won't be in play on gun control, because it's been in play on every other measure Bloomberg and others of his ilk have pushed.
The clearest example is anything related to tobacco. Three decades ago, some of the early smoking restrictions revolved around common-sense efforts to ban smoking on enclosed airplanes and to separate smoking and nonsmoking restaurant patrons. But as the years went on in the aftermath of those early victories, the restrictions got more aggressive and paternalistic to the point where colleges are banning smoking on every square inch of their campuses and sports stadiums are taking away designated outdoor smoking areas. If I'm a gun owner, I'm seeing what's happening to smokers and am incredibly nervous about calls for "common sense gun legislation".....because "common-sense reforms" can quickly become a culture war with wave upon wave of new fronts that are fueled less by an interest in public safety and more by censuring those we deem our moral inferiors. We long ago arrived at the latter category as it applies to smokers, and whether consciously or unconsciously, it's easy to see how gun owners or those who sympathize with them envision themselves in that position in the future if they give an inch today.
And that's not to say that there's 100% overlap between those who oppose expanded gun restrictions and those who oppose the rising tide of smoking bans. I'm sure there are plenty of gun control opponents who favor sticking it to smokers in any way the lifestyle police can dream up. But even at an unconscious level, they have to be processing the punitive treatment of smokers today and recall the time when the movement all began with separating smokers and nonsmokers in restaurants. Knowing that, it's easy to see why they'd be nervous about what today's universal background checks may morph into tomorrow.
And in this respect, the gun control cause could not have a worse spokesman than the aforementioned Mike Bloomberg, who has made an artform of incrementally chipping away at people's freedoms as it applies to what they choose to put into their bodies, constantly pushing the envelope and crossing lines they previously assured us they had no intention of crossing. To be clear, I fully support the assault weapons ban, the high-capacity magazine ban, and universal background checks. There are probably even some additional gun control measures I could get behind. But there are definite limits on how many gun restrictions I would be comfortable with, and seeing Mike Bloomberg's big money leading the charge on this cause tests my comfort level about the endgame. And if I feel that way, as someone in favor of gun control measures, it becomes a lot easier to see why other people who were more skeptical about new gun control laws in the first place are turning against it.