Anyone reading the firearm-related news these days is reminded that anti-gun Democrats appear oblivious to the blunt message sent by millions of American voters last fall. Despite Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris blowing through a mountain of money in campaigning her way to a stunning defeat, Democrats continue to push the same tired gun control agenda that got roundly shown the door in November. Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), for instance, has lately introduced the so-called “Assault Weapons Ban of 2025,” while an Illinois Democrat has proposed a bill to ban semiautomatic “convertible pistols.”
The American public, meanwhile, still isn’t buying it.
Dr. John Lott, Jr., the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), recently described the results of a poll that the CPRC commissioned last December on crime and gun control. The poll asked general election voters in America which of three approaches, in their opinion, was most likely to reduce crime: enacting more gun control; stricter enforcement of existing gun control laws; or having law enforcement arrest violent, repeat offenders and ending cashless bail reforms.
Less than one in five respondents felt the answer was more gun control. “Despite all the claims about support for gun control, only 19% of voters think passing more gun control will reduce crime, slightly more (21%) think stricter enforcement of existing gun control” is the solution. In contrast, more than half of respondents (54%) believed that the most effective approach was to crack down on criminal perpetrators by keeping violent offenders off the streets through arrest and detention.
As Dr. Lott points out, unlike other polls and surveys this poll offered a response choice other than gun control and so is more likely to accurately reflect the public’s feelings. He cites a Rasmussen survey done with a similar set of voters at about the same time as the CPRC poll, but which framed the question in a more constricted way (“Which would do more to reduce gun violence in America, passing new gun control laws or stricter enforcement of existing gun control laws?”). There, also, “new gun control laws” was a less popular choice than greater enforcement of existing laws (31% vs. 56%), but without any third choice, “both percentages are much higher than when respondents have the option of arresting criminals and keeping them in jail.” (Unsurprisingly, the “new gun control laws” option in that survey was most popular among Democrats, supported by 49%; in contrast, only 18% of Republicans felt it was the better approach.)
A research brief published this month by the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, More Policing, Less Murder, appears to bear out the wisdom of ramped-up law enforcement. The brief, which analyzes homicide trends during the 2020-2022 de-policing era and the subsequent “re-policing” years, found that increased policing (arrests and stops) was linked to lower homicide rates: the “sharper the increase in police activity the greater the fall in homicides across the 15 cities.” The only city in the group that failed to show a drop in homicides was also the single jurisdiction that had no increase in police enforcement. In Democrat-run Seattle, “police make 60% fewer stops than they did in 2019 while the murder rate is 50% higher. The city’s experience provides a useful, if tragic, counterfactual that proves the impact of re-policing on murders.”
All indications are that the new Trump administration is better attuned to the public zeitgeist.
For starters, it seems to have rejected the performative, kneejerk “more gun control” response that was a hallmark of the Biden presidency. When asked about a tragic shooting at Florida State University last month and whether there was anything he saw wrong with gun laws in the wake of the shooting, President Trump called such events “terrible,” and told reporters, “But the gun doesn’t do the shooting, the people do.”
Following President Trump’s February 7th Executive Order entitled “Protecting Second Amendment Rights,” the U.S. Department of Justice announced the creation of a Second Amendment Task Force to overturn the anti-gun initiatives of the prior administration, which “placed an undue burden on gun owners and vendors by targeting law-abiding citizens exercising their 2nd Amendment rights.” We’ve seen the official end of Biden’s “zero tolerance” policy for inspections of federal firearm licensees, which, as we noted, had ushered in a “bureaucratic reign of terror that was costing small business people their livelihoods over harmless clerical errors.”
The Trump White House has also ordered the removal of former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s anti-gun tract, Firearm Violence: A Public Health Crisis in America, from the official Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) website, and reframed the issue as what it actually is, one of criminal law and law enforcement rather than epidemics and disease control. In the words of NRA-ILA’s John Commerford, “With a pro-gun House, a pro-gun Senate, and a pro-gun president in the White House, now is the time to put the foot on the gas and try to restore Second Amendment rights of America’s gun owners.”
Meanwhile, Democrats oppose these measures and continue to demand new gun control laws for responsible gun owners, all while rushing to defend murderers, gang members, drug traffickers, and other violent criminals (e.g., here, here, here and here). “We’re seeing Democrat senators, Democrat house members flying down to El Salvador and putting all their political capital behind the position that we need more illegal immigrants in America, we need more criminals in America, and we need more MS-13 gang members in America… It is a very bizarre political decision that the Democrats have made,” notes Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.).
None of this is terribly complicated. Voters, even in ultra-blue California, rejected progressive, soft-on-crime policies and demanded that politicians get serious about crime and public safety. By continuing to throw their support behind gangsters, murderers and other criminals, observes one commentator, the Democrats are simply “digging a deeper and deeper political grave for themselves. And Mr. Trump is selling them the shovel.”
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