The "Dirty Dozen"

Oh, you gotta love grassroots Second Amendment activism! Especially when it grabs attention from bloggers and pro-gun rights news sites, then livens things up with an online petition drive. In the news business, this story has “legs.”

A couple of weeks ago, this column mentioned how the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA) sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi a few days after she announced the creation of a “Second Amendment Task Force.” The job of this task force is to look at laws and regulations which have had a choking effect on the exercise of Second Amendment rights, not to mention the state constitutional rights detailed in more than 40 state constitutions.

Spearheading the effort, of course, was CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, and he’s been getting plenty of applause ever since. I will also acknowledge my own involvement in this right up front.

Credit for first referring to this list of 12 states — known as “The Dirty Dozen” — goes to attorney William Kirk, president of Washington Gun Law and a guy with whom anyone would enjoy sharing an evening around the campfire or in more civilized surroundings.

If you live in one of these states, CCRKBA has asked Bondi to literally turn loose the Task Force: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Washington.

In a letter to Bondi, Gottlieb said the offending states “have adopted laws in recent years which have essentially relegated Second Amendment rights to the level of government-regulated privileges.” What else can you say about laws requiring permits to purchase firearms, and infringements to include mandatory attendance of a gun safety course as a prerequisite to getting a permit? As more than one embattled gun owner noted in reaction to Gottlieb’s proposal, once you need to get permission to exercise a right, it is no longer a right.

The Petition

Then came the petition. It’s a single-page self-explanatory document full of “Whereases” and it ends with a request that Bondi “ultimately seek injunctions and/or restraining orders” against the gun control laws in these states.

Did someone ‘say it hit a nerve?’ I wouldn’t dare take a guess at how many people have signed the online petition but Gottlieb told me days after the launch he was genuinely impressed at how much momentum it had gathered.

No anti-gun politician in any of the Dirty Dozen states offered an immediate reaction. You know how it is when someone presumes that if they ignore something, it will just go away. Yeah, good luck with that.

The CCRKBA petition contains less than 300 words. Big things, as they say, come from small beginnings.

In Colorado, Republican lawmakers simultaneously sent a letter to Bondi, asking her “to review the constitutionality of nearly 20 state gun laws they say infringe on Second Amendment rights,” according to the Colorado Newsline.

If there is a moral to this story, it would be “What goes around comes around.” For decades in some of these states, anti-gunners have delighted in trampling on the rights of law-abiding gun owners. Now the tables appear to have turned and it is their turn to squirm. Legal actions take time, but if the courts do their job properly, a lot of clearly unconstitutional gun control laws are going to get very publicly trashed.

Boys ‘N Girls

One of my social media followers recently brought my attention to a Gallup survey which says probably more about the state of society than the political left might care to acknowledge.

According to Gallup, “the percentage of Republican women who own a gun has increased from 19% in 2007-2012 to 33% in 2019-2024.”

At the same time, “the rate has fallen seven percentage points among Democratic men, to 29%.”

Oh, say it ain’t so! A higher percentage of conservative women own guns than liberal men.

The Gallup poll, which was made public last fall, showed gun ownership among U.S. adults “is holding steady near 30%, but that masks a sharp increase in ownership among Republican women offsetting declines among Democratic and independent men.” The Gallup report also noted “Republican men remain the most likely gun owners among gender and party identification subgroups, at 60%.”

Here was something else Insider found intriguing: “Men (43%) are more than twice as likely as women (20%) to own a gun. However, the gender gap has shrunk from 30 points in 2007-2012 to 23 points in 2019-2024.

“While the gender gap has shrunk,” Gallup said, “the political party gap has expanded. In 2007-2012, personal gun ownership rates differed by 16 points among Republicans (38%) and Democrats (22%). Now the gap is 28 points (47% and 19%, respectively).”

According to Gallup, some of the highest ownership rates are found among —
• men living in rural areas (67%)
• rural Republicans (62%)
• conservatives living in rural areas (62%)
• rural Southerners (59%)

In contrast, some of the lowest gun ownership rates can be found among:
• women aged 18 to 29 (9%)
• Democrats (9%) and liberals (10%) aged 18 to 29
• residents of big cities in the East (10%)
• women living in the East (10%)
• Eastern residents aged 18 to 29 (10%)

Talking Data

The gang at Rasmussen Reports, one of my favorite polling firms, recently did a survey which revealed 19% of American adults say they, or someone in their immediate family, bought a gun during the past 12 months.

“For the past five years,” Rasmussen said, “Americans have been buying firearms at the rate of more than 1 million a month, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation.”

The survey of 1,185 American Adults was conducted on April 7-9, Rasmussen said. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence.

Surprisingly, 45 percent of survey respondents say it is too easy to buy a gun in this country, and among government employees, 54 percent think it is too easy. Perhaps these people have not tried to purchase a firearm lately, especially if they live in one of the “Dirty Dozen” states.

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