The chart above is from Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com. It shows that th gap between Republicans and Democrats on guns has widened in recent years. Much of that widening happened during the Obama administration, when NRA propaganda convinced Republicans that Obama was coming for their guns. It was not true, but it was effective.
Before Obama took office, only about half of Republicans thought protecting gun rights was more important than controlling gun ownership, but that percentage is now over 75%. This shows just how hard it's going to be to get the Republican-controlled Congress to do anything at all about our plague of gun deaths. They will be afraid their base would punish them (and the NRA would cut off their funding).
