MSNBC’s Online Poll On Guns Didn’t Go How It Expected

 September 18, 2019 by Tom Knighton 

No one is about to mistake MSNBC for a pro-gun outlet anytime soon. Their talking heads won’t shut up long enough for that to happen, for one thing. They’re going to continue going on and on about the evils of the Second Amendment and how we simply have to “do something.”

However, they held an online poll to find out what people thought about citizens carrying firearms.

It’s pretty likely they figured the results would be split to some degree, but considering the average MSNBC viewer, they also probably thought it would come down on the side of gun control.

They were spectacularly wrong.

Progressive cable news channel MSNBC posted an online poll to try to measure support for gun control, but they were likely disappointed with the overwhelming result.

The poll showed that 93 percent of respondents supported the right of citizens to carry guns in public.

Only 4 percent who responded to the decidedly unscientific poll said they were opposed to people carrying guns in public.

Another 2 percent responded that people should be allowed to carry guns in public, but only for self defense.

Now, it should be noted that this isn’t a scientific poll and shouldn’t be used for debate purposes. We all know how these things go. Someone like MSNBC posts the poll, pro-gun and anti-gun people rally their forces to go and vote on the poll and try to sway the results their way.

You also get a number of people who are just there and answer honestly.

What you usually don’t find, though, is something this lopsided.

Of course, the question wouldn’t withstand scrutiny from a professional pollster, either. After all, what’s the context? It doesn’t differentiate between the rules surrounding such carry, such as those found in a constitutional carry state versus a very restrictive state like California’s. It’s just people’s off-the-cuff response to the question.

And as of this morning, with over 700.000 votes in, it remains at 93 percent supporting the right to bear arms in public.

Again, this doesn’t actually mean all that much. Even many anti-gunners seem to believe that there’s some right to keep and bear arms, so it stands to reason that some will say there’s a right to carry a gun in public…for some people. After all, they don’t expect celebrities or officials to not have the means to defend themselves.

Then again, it’s possible the only reason there were 700K votes on this puppy is because pro-gunners flock to polls like this almost like they would one offering free ammo and anti-gunners just aren’t that interested in the topic.

That would shock me, though, since so much of their time and effort has been built up into portraying their position as the mainstream position while claiming folks like me are radicals for not wanting to give up freedom in the name of some illusory safety. One would think they’d love a poll like this as a way to show just how significant their numbers are.

Then again, maybe they didn’t simply because they can’t.