How gun control is losing.......badly
This Saturday marks the one-year anniversary of the massacre at Newtown, Conn.’s Sandy Hook Elementary School. Twenty children, six staff members, shooter Adam Lanza and his mother all died that day. The killings reinvigorated both sides of the gun-control debate, but gun rights advocates maintained the edge they’ve had for years.
An impressive (roughly) 1,500 state gun bills have been introduced in the year since the Newtown massacre and, of those, 109 are now law, according to The New York Times. Seventy of the enacted laws loosen gun restrictions, while just 39 tighten them. And, though largely symbolic, some 136 bills nullifying federal gun regulations were sponsored in 40 states. In Colorado, two pro-gun control lawmakers were booted from office in historic recalls and a third stepped down in anticipation of a similar fight.
The nonprofit Sunlight Foundation, which promotes government openness and transparency, reviewed lobbying, spending and policies at the state and federal level over the years and, along nearly every metric, rights advocates have trounced opponents.
The gap between direct contributions in favor of gun rights and those in support of gun control is stunningly large, with gun-control contributions amounting to just 6.5 percent of what gun-rights advocates raised from 1989 through the 2012 elections. Gun rights candidates and causes raised $29.4 million in direct contributions to candidates, parties, and PACs at the federal and state level. Gun control causes raised just $1.9 million, according to Sunlight-provided data from the Center for Responsive Politics and the National Institute on Money In State Politics. In seven states--Alaska, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, West Virginia and Wyoming--no contributions whatsoever were made in support of gun control.
http://m.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/12/11/how-gun-control-is-losing-badly-in-charts/
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