For most of the 1990s and the subsequent decade, a substantial majority of Americans believed it was more important to control gun ownership than to protect gun owners’ rights. But in December 2014, the balance of opinion flipped: For the first time, more Americans say that protecting gun rights is […] Read more »
What does gun violence really cost?
… How much does gun violence cost our country? It’s a question we’ve been looking into at Mother Jones ever since the 2012 mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, left 58 injured and 12 dead. How much care would the survivors and the victims’ families need? What would […] Read more »
Republicans are twice as likely as Democrats to live in a household with a gun
Republicans are more than twice as likely as Democrats to live in a household with a gun, according to data released this month from the General Social Survey, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago and analyzed by The Washington Post. It continues a long-term trend tracked in the […] Read more »
A Different Kind of Security Election
Before every presidential election, we chew over the question of whether this will be a foreign policy or a domestic election. Will we be talking about “security moms” or “soccer moms”? 2016 is going to be a security election, but not in the traditional war/peace sense. Instead, we need to […] Read more »
Mood on Economy Up, Race Relations Sharply Down
Americans’ views about the economy, their overall quality of life and the opportunity to get ahead through hard work are more positive than they were before the 2014 State of the Union Address — echoing their improving economic confidence. At the same time, Americans are markedly less satisfied with the […] Read more »
A public opinion trend that matters: Priorities for gun policy
Last month, the Pew Research Center released a survey showing that a question about gun policy we have been asking since 1993 had passed a key milestone: For the first time in more than two decades, a higher percentage (52%) said it was more important to protect the right of […] Read more »