Despite concerns I have about the anti-gun groups looking like they may actually be building momentum, Stephen E. Wright writing at “The Bluff” has taken a detailed analysis of the statistics, which show that the anti-gun groups actually aren’t doing as well as you might think:
1. Anti 2nd amendment FB groups are much smaller than pro 2nd amendment groups (like 10x)
2. Anti 2nd amdment FB groups are growing much slower than pro 2nd amendment groups (like 4x)
3. Anti 2nd amendment FB groups have an older following than pro 2nd amendment groups (like 25-44 for the NRA and 55+ for Bloomberg’s Everytown)
Go read the whole thing. Of course, it’s depressing that NAGR has so many Facebook followers, given my very low opinion of that group and its proprietor. But as Bitter mentioned, Brown is very good at creating the kinds of graphics that people share and that go viral. Either way, it does show that as much as they might be gaining media juice, we are too, and faster than they are. And with the more favorable demographics.
But gun ownership is declining! And MDA scores another win! The NRA is a bunch of redneck racists!
If a tree falls in the forest, and the media refuses to cover it, does it make a sound? I hate that that’s a footnote to every occurrence in the gun control fight, but that’s the nature of fighting the left.
I wonder if media coverage will change in the next generation if gun ownership continues to skew more educated and suburban. If you go to the HQ of MSNBC or the NY Times, I bet the number of people who have fired a gun is microscopic. I don’t think many gun culture 1.0 types got journalism degrees and moved to big cities, but there are plenty of young AR-15 owners that could take paths like that.
Mr. Wright’s article doesn’t get too deep into demographics, but I think that might be the single biggest factor in the fight for gun rights over the long term. If gun culture 2.0 continues to grow, I think (or at least I hope) gun control will be thoroughly fringe by the time Chelsea or Malia are running for office.
Though depending on where the offices are…. they’d have to give up their AR’s…
Thanks for the Link! I don’t really blog any more but after I’d been collecting numbers and messing with this spreadsheet for awhile I figured I might as well share it.
Any online poll or rally will prove that pro-gunners are the energized bunch, but as you’ve talked about many times I don’t know how many young gun culture 2.0 types will vote with us if it means voting for a non-cool Republican vs. a Democrat who is pro-cool stuff like Gay Marriage.
Social issues are a real problem for pro-gun conservatives, and hopefully we’ll pull back from some of these issues before we self destruct. The problem is that there is a strong faction that is just as fiercely and unyieldingly anti gay-marriage as the younger voters are for it.
I still think, though, that if we can hold the line long enough eventually the Dems will back away from gun control just like the Reps are going to have to back away from social issues like gay marriage.
And just think: anti-2A groups are smaller and growing slower than pro-2A groups, despite all the free air time the mainstream media donates to the anti-2A cause.
How big would the pro-2A groups be if there were one or mre genuinely conservative network media outlets (Fox News doesn’t count; they’re neutral at best, IMHO) willing to give that much free air time to pro-2A voices?
Facebook likes mean nothing. They can be bought for a few dollars per thousand. Really want to have fun. Buy 70,000 likes for MDA and watch the page get suspended and all their likes wiped out.
In that case Facebook likes represent a ceiling of legitimate interest no?
Meaning that MDA’s *real* intensity gap is at that level or lower.
Most likely. It’s pretty easy to buy 1000 likes a week without tripping the facebook fraud detection system.