By: Anthony Morelli
A reporter ventured outside of his liberal bubble and was terrified by what he found.
He expected most Americans to share his fear of guns.
But instead, he found out that most normal people do not hate guns like he does.
The people who become journalists usually come from cosmopolitan areas of the country where owning a gun is frowned upon by high society.
Even those journalists who do come from red states are usually people who hated their upbringing and wanted to get out.
As such, there is a heavy bias in most news organizations against gun owners, and in favor of strict gun control measures.
Many of these journalists surely assume that most Americans agree with them, and that gun control is only being held up by “rednecks” in the most “backwards” parts of the country.
One journalist set out to try and confirm his suspicions about this, but he wound up coming to a very different conclusion.
He realized that most Americans do not hate guns at all, and often actually know people who own guns and are peaceful. And these discoveries horrified him.
Here is what Joe Arney, a reporter at the University of Colorado, had to say as he spoke to a professor who has researched this topic heavily: “Whether you consider the Second Amendment a dangerous relic or inspiration for a tattoo, the U.S. public as a whole doesn’t consider guns an important issue, except in the immediate wake of a mass shooting.”
He then quoted Chris Vargo, a professor at the university: “It’s a little depressing that only 8 percent of America thinks guns are an important issue. It makes it obvious to me that, with this much disinterest, gun control isn’t going to happen at the national level.”
They both seemed absolutely inconsolable about this fact, but in fact it shows that Americans still have a reverence for the Constitution.
The Founding Fathers of this country knew how important it was for citizens to have access to firearms in order to create a balance of power between the people and the government.
And apparently, the American public has not forgotten this fact.
The article continues, “Vargo’s research, which was published in Mass Communication and Society in April, looked at agenda setting and gun control to better understand whether public sentiment around guns is strong enough to pressure legislators into taking action.
“Long story short, they don’t. Vargo’s dataset goes back to 2015, and you can easily point out where devastating mass shootings like Parkland, Uvalde and even Boulder took place—there are spikes in Google searches for terms like ‘second amendment rights,’ ‘concealed carry permit’ and ‘sandy hook donations.’”
But it turns out that these spikes don’t last, and people go back to their usual routine of having respect for their gun-owning neighbors, even if they do not own guns themselves.
That is how it should be. No one is required to like guns, or to own one themselves. But the Constitution demands that all Americans have the right to.