The report cited concluded that people are more comfortable with gun ownership "than ever before" and speaks of a change in "attitudes about gun control".
The fact is, it was news reporting, more than anything else, that put private gun ownership in a very bad light, starting in the late 1950s when Dr. Milton Eisenhower made the famous but misleading statement about people being more likely to shoot someone they know than to defend themselves. Not long afterward, the Kennedy assassination triggered a long and intensive media campaign against firearms.
The reporting was by no means balanced: according to a David Brinkley report on ABC television, and also mentioned in The American Rifleman magazine, a policy memorandum issued some time during the mid to late 1960s directed Associated Press reporters to not report any news that might portray gun ownership in a favorable light. For decades, none of us saw any favorable reports on firarms on the national news.
Here's a case in point: in 1966, a deranged psychopath named Charles Whitman took several firearms to the top of a tower at the University of Texas at Austin and proceeded to murder a number of innocent people below with sniper fire until he was shot buy a policeman who got to the top. Whitman was kept down and unable to shoot for some time by students who retrieved their rifles; I recall that one, who had a 1917 Enfield, was studying gunsmithing. Not one mention was made of the contribution of these lawfully armed citizens in any of the national news reports of the day, all of which used the occasion to call for "strong gun control". That likely explains why they are not mentioned even in passing in the Wiki article on the subject.
Unfavorable reports, however, were numerous--very numerous--and pervasive. Gun ownership has been equated with crime in most media accounts since around 1960; only very recently have more balanced reports been seen. From 1963 to 1968, when GCA 1968 was enacted, the phrase "mail order firearm" was the rallying cry of all three networks, mentioned at least weakly. Concurrent with that, the term "magnum revolver" was often given the title of second most awful thing in private ownership, and every time one was used in a crime of any import, it was covered at the top of the hour on both television and radio; two of the networks called for the banning of all "magnums" after someone used a .357 to shoot both pilots on a Pacific Airlines plane in 1964. For a while after that, any handgun was stigmatized. After that, "automatic weapon", later corrected to read "semiautomatic weapon" was the term most often heard in derision, with "powerful nine millimeter handgun" a close second, and later, "assault rifle" and even "assault handgun" became the targets. Now, of course, it is "high capacity magazines".
Over the years, this drumbeat had an expectable impact on peoples' attitudes on gun control. It is refreshing to see a poll that shows something of a reversal in this trend. It is also refreshing to see more balanced reporting these days.
Progress has been made, but there is a lot more work to do. There are still a large number of people who do not support the right to keep and bear arms and who may hold negative opinions of those who do own guns. That places a great deal of responsibility on each of us at THR. How we conduct ourselves at the keyboard and in public can either help make the results of future Gallup polls more favorable or reverse the progress that has been made.
