It happens every election year, whether it is a Presidential election year or mid-terms.
Candidates talk about what they say that voters want and, then, campaign to solve those problems (supposedly).
But that begs the question: Is what politicians say that voters want really what they want, or is it just a strawman that they’re using to try to gaslight people into supporting them?
There are a myriad of issues, and the answer to that question will depend on each topic, but when it comes to the question of gun control versus arresting criminals, we can actually give you an answer. Or I should say, the Crime Prevention Research Center can give us the answer to that question:
The Crime Prevention Research Center commissioned a new McLaughlin & Associates survey of 1,000 American general election voters on July 22nd, 2026 (cross tabs available here). Despite frequent claims that the public supports gun control as a way to reduce crime, only 24.9% of voters believe passing additional gun control laws would reduce crime, while an even smaller share (22.6%) believe stricter enforcement of existing gun control laws would do so. Combined, just 47.5% of voters think gun control plays the primary role in reducing crime. By comparison, 44.2% believe the better approach is to arrest criminals and keep them in jail.
Now, you might be asking, “But what about those surveys that Democrat politicians and the mainstream legacy media keep quoting which say that people want more gun control?”
It’s a fair question, and the Crime Prevention Research Center addressed that issue, too:
Most public opinion surveys present a false choice by limiting respondents to two gun control options: passing additional gun control laws or enforcing existing ones more aggressively. That design makes it appear that the only ways to reduce crime involve gun control. Whether respondents favor new gun control laws or stricter enforcement of existing laws, both answers assume that gun control provides the primary solution.
Our survey offered respondents another option—arresting criminals and keeping them in jail—and their responses changed dramatically.
Put simply: the people pushing gun control have been lying to us by creating surveys that ask questions to only give them the answers that they want. It’s kind of like when someone asks you, “Have you quit beating your wife?” The only way to answer honestly is not to answer in a way that the question tries to force you to answer, which is a yes or no answer to that particular question, either of which would imply that you have beaten your wife. It’s an ugly way to try to manipulate people.
But the fact of the matter is that most people don’t want more gun control. They want criminals locked up. Period.
Yet, the people who keep pushing for gun control are the same people who keep telling us that everyone wants more gun control, and those same people are the folks pushing to let violent criminals off the hook or out of jail early.
It’s almost as if they want crime to go up while getting us to believe that being unarmed is in our best interests.
And you have to wonder why they want to put you and me in that position at all.