While Democrats try to push for more gun control once again, the consequences of the party’s embrace of soft-on-crime policies and lax attitude toward Black Lives Matter riots aren’t going away.
Writing for the Washington Post, Anne Branigin details how gun ownership among women has increased over the past few years. Women are generally far more supportive of gun control than men, but gun ownership among women has risen from between 9%-14% as recently as 2014 to 22% in 2021. Branigin highlights one single mother who no longer felt that her dog, mace, and alarm system were sufficient protection for her home as homicides surged to record numbers across the country.
The surge in homicides didn’t just lead to women becoming first-time gun owners. Gun sales also went up among Hispanics, blacks, and Asian Americans in 2020 and again in 2021. Democrats and liberals who were unwilling to take a strong stance against BLM riots helped foster a lawless environment in several cities across the country. Soft-on-crime district attorneys helped feed into it by treating criminals as victims. If Democrats running their cities and states wouldn’t keep them safe, women and minorities decided to take their safety into their own hands.
Branigin notes that this will have an effect on future debates about gun control. In fact, we are already seeing the consequences. According to Pew, the share of people who support stricter gun laws fell from 60% in September 2019 to 53% in September 2021. Gallup found in November 2021 that support for stricter gun laws fell to a seven-year low, at 52%.
While Democrats claim that support for gun control is popular with the vast majority of voters, that has not been the case. Gun control polls well as a vague promise to make gun laws tougher, but Democrats have struggled to get specific proposals across the finish line on the national level, as those specific proposals target law-abiding gun owners and would do little to stop the shootings Democrats use to promote their bills.
When combined with Democrats ignoring the vast majority of gun violence that takes place in the cities they run, gun control was always a losing issue. With the crime wave creating millions of new gun owners, including from the demographics that gun control activists count among their supporters on the matter, they are only going to lose more ground. Democrats didn’t treat crime and lawlessness seriously, and now the gun control movement is going to pay the price.
