Why post this article on the website of an art center? Because one of our artists has a disability because of gun violence.
“The gun issue is a good example. The NRA has spent decades cultivating passionate, single-issue voters—the panic buyers. And it has successfully linked ownership of firearms to Republican identity. “The NRA has framed gun rights really well,” says Scott Melzer, a sociologist at Michigan’s Albion College. “If you lose gun rights, then a tyrannical leftist government will tamp out every other right as well.”
That framing appears to have been effective. For 25 years, the Pew Research Center has been asking a simple question: Which do you think is more important—to protect the right of Americans to own guns, or to control gun ownership? Republicans used to be divided on this, even during the debate around the Clinton-era band ban on assault-style rifles. (That ban expired in 2004.) As late as 2007, near the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, the GOP remained basically split, 50 percent to 45, in favor of rights. After Obama was elected, though, the party went full NRA. The latest numbers, from 2017, show that 79 percent of Republicans believe gun rights matter more than gun control, and that same pro-gun slant crops up in other data. The number of Republicans who believe that having a gun in the home makes it safer has nearly doubled since 2000, even though gun ownership has barely budged. Republicans know that their team likes guns, so they like them, too—even as crime goes down and mass shootings go up.”