There’s more good news for the people who still believe that God, guns, and guts made America great. Rasmussen reports forty-eight percent of likely voters said America needed stricter gun laws. Two years earlier it had been fifty-one.
The decline wasn’t a landslide, but represents a consistent trend downward for America’s gun control industry. Sure, the right to keep and bear arms isn’t an 80/20 issue — yet — but it’s favorable enough that almost no one running for Congress outside a handful of crime-soaked blue cities wants to test voter support for more gun control laws.
Across more than half the map, that experiment had already been run. Twenty-nine states now have constitutional carry. A law-abiding adult can carry a handgun without begging for a government permission slip. The constantly predicted bloodbaths from the shrieking harpies at Brady, Giffords and Everytown never happened. In any of these states. It never does.
People kept going to work, to church, to Friday-night football. The sky didn’t fall. There weren’t shoot-outs over parking places. The only thing that fell was violent crime rates, nationwide. The FBI’s 2025 report put the murder rate at 4.1 per 100,000—tied with 1955 and 1956, a seventy-year low. Violent crime posted its steepest one-year drop since the Bureau began compiling national statistics.
Meanwhile, the appetite for treating every rifle as a national emergency is on the ropes. In Viramontes v. Cook County, the Supreme Court is widely expected (fingers crossed) to finish the job by the end of June, 2027.
Contrast that with one city that still delusionally tells itself it’s proof that the other way works. Chicago, wrapped in some of the strictest anti-gun ordinances in the country and led by politicians who keep demanding more of the same failed schemes, had already recorded nearly 280 homicides by late August. That single municipal total is higher than the entire annual murder counts of most states—places with mountains, prairies, and Main Streets where permitless carry is ordinary and the law.
Illinois’ onerous gun laws didn’t stop the gang violence. Cook County has endured a blood-soaked era under a Soros-backed prosecutor who didn’t prosecute gang members. Defunding the Chicago Police didn’t help crime stats either. The same goes for the state’s abolition of cash bail, which put accused violent offenders back onto the streets with an ankle monitor and a pinkie promise to behave.
Voters noticed, even when the mainstream media looks the other way. Fifty-two percent now say enforcing laws already on the books—prosecuting the bad guys and putting them away—would do more than inflicting yet another round of control on the law-abiding.
The country has already watched Beto O’Rourke try that pitch on state and national levels and they weren’t buying it. Culture moved first. People who lived where carry was legal don’t wake up afraid of their neighbors. And in the gun-grabbers’ utopia of Chicago, more and more are rejecting the old promise that yet another gun control restriction will buy us safety. This time. Finally.