Somehow, I suspect the ad will fail to mention that fact.

Several weeks ago, I took note of the ongoing investigation into an operation run by Federal agents that allowed guns from the United States to be sold to illegal buyers and transferred to Mexican drug gangs, resulting in hundreds of deaths in Mexico and the death of at least one Federal agent. Now it appears that the operation included selling guns procured with Federal funds as well:

Not only did U.S. officials approve, allow and assist in the sale of more than 2,000 guns to the Sinaloa cartel — the federal government used taxpayer money to buy semi-automatic weapons, sold them to criminals and then watched as the guns disappeared.

This disclosure, revealed in documents obtained by Fox News, could undermine the Department of Justice’s previous defense that Operation Fast and Furious was a “botched” operation where agents simply “lost track” of weapons as they were transferred from one illegal buyer to another. Instead, it heightens the culpability of the federal government as Mexico, according to sources, has opened two criminal investigations into the operation that flooded their country with illegal weapons.

The details of one operation reveal just how idiotic this entire operation seems in retrospect:

According to documents obtained by Fox News, Agent John Dodson was ordered to buy six semi-automatic Draco pistols — two of those were purchased at the Lone Wolf gun store in Peoria, Ariz. An unusual sale, Dodson was sent to the store with a letter of approval from David Voth, an ATF group supervisor.

Dodson then sold the weapons to known illegal buyers, while fellow agents watched from their cars nearby.

This was not a “buy-bust” or a sting operation, where police sell to a buyer and then arrest them immediately afterward. In this case, agents were “ordered” to let the sale go through and follow the weapons to a stash house.

According to sources directly involved in the case, Dodson felt strongly that the weapons should not be abandoned and the stash house should remain under 24-hour surveillance. However, Voth disagreed and ordered the surveillance team to return to the office. Dodson refused, and for six days in the desert heat kept the house under watch, defying direct orders from Voth.

A week later, a second vehicle showed up to transfer the weapons. Dodson called for an interdiction team to move in, make the arrest and seize the weapons. Voth refused and the guns disappeared with no surveillance.

Up until the last part, this story seems like a fairly standard buy and bust operation. Why the ATF was willing to let this weapons get away without any means of tracking them is the question everyone has been asking since this story became public back in March, largely thanks to Dodson finally coming forward. Without a valid explanation, it becomes harder to accept the “botched sting operation” theory unless you believe that the ATF is staffed by people who make the Keystone Cops seems competent.

Meanwhile, down in Mexico, law enforcement authorities are still waiting for someone from the U.S. to tell them what’s going on:

Marisela Morales, Mexico’s attorney general and a longtime favorite of American law enforcement agents in Mexico, told The Times that she first learned about Fast and Furious from news reports. And to this day, she said, U.S. officials have not briefed her on the operation gone awry, nor have they apologized.

“At no time did we know or were we made aware that there might have been arms trafficking permitted,” Morales, Mexico’s highest-ranking law enforcement official, said in a recent interview. “In no way would we have allowed it, because it is an attack on the safety of Mexicans.”

Morales said she did not want to draw conclusions before the outcome of U.S. investigations, but that deliberately letting weapons “walk” into Mexico — with the intention of tracing the guns to drug cartels — would represent a “betrayal” of a country enduring a drug war that has killed more than 40,000 people. U.S. agents lost track of hundreds of weapons under the program.

Concealment of the bloody toll of Fast and Furious took place despite official pronouncements of growing cooperation and intelligence-sharing in the fight against vicious Mexican drug-trafficking organizations. The secrecy also occurred as President Felipe Calderon and other senior Mexican officials complained bitterly, time and again, about the flow of weapons into Mexico from the U.S.

(…)

Patricia Gonzalez, the top state prosecutor in Chihuahua at the time of her brother’s 2010 kidnapping, noted that she had worked closely with U.S. officials for years and was stunned that she did not learn until many months later, through media reports, about the link between his death and Fast and Furious weapons.

“The basic ineptitude of these officials [who ordered the Fast and Furious operation] caused the death of my brother and surely thousands more victims,” Gonzalez said.

Fast and Furious weapons have also been linked to other high-profile shootings. On May 24, a helicopter ferrying Mexican federal police during an operation in the western state of Michoacan was forced to land after bullets from a powerful Barrett .50-caliber rifle pierced its fuselage and armor-reinforced windshield. Three officers were wounded.

Authorities later captured dozens of drug gang gunmen involved in the attack and seized 70 weapons, including a Barrett rifle, according to a report by U.S. congressional committees. Some of the guns were traced to Fast and Furious.

Email traffic and U.S. congressional testimony by ATF agents and others make clear that American officials purposefully concealed from Mexico’s government details of the operation, launched in November 2009 by the ATF field offices in Arizona and New Mexico.

As the article goes on to note, one official at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City warned that failure to share information with the Mexican government would irreparably harm U.S.-Mexican relations. Now it, appears that this is exactly what’s going to happen.

What exactly was going on here? And why would the ATF have been buying four semi-automatic pistols and selling them to known criminals if it wasn’t part of a sting operation?

These strike me as being questions that need to be answered sooner rather than later.

Raw Story tweeted  ”Republicans in Rep. Giffords’ district plan to raffle off the same type of gun Jared Loughner used. ” This links to their own story demonstrating that they’re doing no such thing.

The Republican Party in Arizona’s Pima County, which is represented by Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), is in the midst of a fundraising raffle, $10 per entry.

The prize: the same model of gun that delivered a near-fatal blast to the Democratic lawmaker’s skull outside a Tucson grocery store in January.

Tucson is in Pima County.

The local party sent out its e-newsletter late last week advertising the raffle. On the third page of the seven-page document, a large illustration of the gun appears with the headline “Help Pima GOP get out the vote and maybe help yourself to a new Glock .40.“

But, as the story goes on to tell us, the Glock being raffled off is actually not the one Loughner used:

The gun is a Glock 23, an updated model of the Glock 19 Jared Loughner used during his January 8, 2011 shooting spree that killed six and injured 13 others, including Giffords.

If, by “updated model” they mean completely different weapon, they’re right. The Glock 19 is 9 mm (specifically, a 9x19mm Parabellum) whereas the Glock 23 is a .40 caliber (10×22 Smith & Wesson).

Now, given that six people died and nineteen people, among them Gabby Giffords, were seriously wounded in a mass shooting there a less than nine months ago, one can question the taste and judgment of the Pima County GOP. Although my strong guess is that they just thought a Glock would be a really great draw in a place where handguns are wildly popular.

There’s no mention of Giffords in the ad and, frankly, I can’t imagine that they have any interest in drawing yet more attention to the shooting that transformed her into a beloved national figure.

UPDATE: Diana Wueger reminds me of this handy dandy Journalist’s Guide to Firearms Identification:

I believe that this safely falls under the heading “Only in America”.

If watching television makes you want to go out and shoot something (preferably something made out of clay and legal to shoot), then Radio Shack might have an offer that’s right up your alley. A Radio Shack Super Store in Hamilton, Montana has decided to offer a free gun to qualifying customers who sign up for new Dish Network service.

According to ravalirepublic.com, qualifying customers have the choice between a Hi Point 380 pistol or a 20-gauge shotgun. Radio Shack itself isn’t stocking these items, instead handing out gift certificates good at a place called Frontier Guns & Ammo. Background check (also free) is required.

This just strikes me as an odd promotion. Also, I’ve never heard of Hi Point until now. How do they handle? (For the record, I prefer CZ — I just love the accuracy and smooth firing.)

This one comes from our Is This Really Necessary? Department:

Rep. Joe Wilson’s (R-S.C.) health care-era “you lie” interruption of President Obama is now reportedly being commemorated with a place on a new, limited edition line of assault rifle components.

The Columbia Free Times reports that the words are being engraved on a series of lower receivers manufactured for popular AR-15 assault rifles. Lower receivers are one of the primary pieces of the firearms.

“Palmetto State Armory would like to honor our esteemed congressman Joe Wilson with the release of our new ‘You Lie’ AR-15 lower receiver,” the weapon manufacturer’s site writes in the product description. “Only 999 of these will be produced, get yours before they are gone!”

What’s next, a Bobby Kennedy Commemorative target?

Reflecting on the Tuscon shootings, Thomas Ricks asks,

At what point does the right to own a firearm begin to impinge on other people’s rights?

OK, try it this way: At what point does the right of crazy people to buy weapons begin to seem crazy?

Arizona, like every other state, has laws denying the right of crazy people to buy guns.  The trouble is that we often don’t know people are crazy until they go out and shoot people.  And, of course, even when we have strong reason to suspect that people are crazy — as was the case with the shooter here – there’s still a matter of Constitutionally protected rights to due process.

WSJ has an informative article (“Massacre Renews Focus on Gun Buys“) on just this issue in today’s edition. Some excerpts:

Under federal and Arizona law, a mentally ill person is barred from purchasing a gun if a court has deemed that person a danger. And in hindsight, there is evidence of Mr. Loughner’s disturbed mental state.

At Pima Community College, Mr. Loughner had five contacts with campus police. The school suspended him last year and said he couldn’t return unless he obtained clearance from a mental-health professional that indicated his presence wouldn’t pose a danger to himself or others.

But a federal law-enforcement official on Sunday said there was no evidence Mr. Loughner had been under any court-ordered treatment, which is one clear route to barring someone from buying a gun. Officials said he bought his gun legally Nov. 30 at a Tucson outdoor-sports store after a full background check [emphasis mine - jhj].

“You can be diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic and buy a gun,” said an official with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. “A judge has to find you mentally ill before you are prohibited.”

Nor is this the first case in recent memory:

In the 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech, which resulted in the deaths of 33 people, gunman Seung-Hui Cho had been considered dangerous by a court and ordered to get outpatient treatment. That information wasn’t forwarded to the federal database maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation used by gun stores in conducting background checks, and should have stopped him from buying a gun.

In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, Congress passed a law providing financial incentives to encourage states to submit such court records.

Other recent shootings have brought few changes. Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, awaiting trial after a 2009 shooting spree at Fort Hood, Texas, passed a background check to buy a pistol at a Texas gun shop even though he was on terrorism investigators’ radar for contacting a radical Islamist cleric. Such information doesn’t show up in background checks. In the wake of the shooting, which killed 13 people, legislation restricting gun sales to people involved in terror probes failed to pass.

Mr. Loughner was arrested for drug possession in 2007; the case was “dismissed with prejudice” and further details of the arrest weren’t available Sunday. Under federal law, people addicted to a controlled substance are prohibited from buying a gun, said Joshua Horwitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. But the addiction would have to be reported to the relevant state or federal database.

The problem, it would seem, isn’t that our current gun laws are inadequate but that we’re inadequately enforcing our current gun laws.

Balloon Juice‘s mistermix offers a plan for “sensible gun control” in the wake of Saturday’s tragic shooting spree in Tuscon.

In these kinds of mass shootings, the shooter is most vulnerable when he’s reloading. It’s simple logic that the more times he has to reload, the better chance bystanders have to tackle him, which is really the only defense that unarmed bystanders have. (And the notion that armed civilian bystanders could have gotten off a clean shot in the chaos of humanity surrounding this shooting is a fantasy. )

Since Arizona is one of a few states where extended magazines are legal, the killer was able to walk into a gun store and purchase an extended magazine along with his Glock pistol. It’s clear that the easily availability of extended magazines contributed to the loss of life on Saturday.

I’m not a 2nd Amendment absolutist.  There’s no plausible reason why private citizens ought to be able to own bazookas, much less nuclear weapons, for example.   Nor do I oppose registration requirements, so long as they’re not particularly onerous.

But I’ve never understood the “assault weapon” rationale.  If citizens can own semi-automatic rifles and handguns — and we’ve rather firmly established that they can — the notion that we should limit them to, say, a 15-round magazine rather than a 30-round magazine strikes me as absurd.

Is it a good thing that Jared Loughner didn’t have a 31st round to fire?  Sure.  But, if you take Loughner as your model for limiting the rights of the 99.99 percent of gun owners who aren’t homicidal maniacs, we’d ban clips altogether.  Surely, we’d have been even better off if he had to manually load each round into the chamber individually?

Indeed, the notion that we’d say, “We’re fine with nuts being able to easily kill 10 innocent civilians before people have a chance to jump him but, goddamn it, we draw the line at 20!” is absurd.  The maximum number of people it’s acceptable to murder in any given situation, I’d think, is zero.   Which is why we make it against the law.

Thankfully, we don’t sell guns — any more than we do cars, knifes, or other things which could be used by an evil person to create mayhem — with the psychotic in mind.

h/t DougJ

In fairness, these are sometimes referred to as “assault rifles” or “semi-automatic weapons.”

A local business owner is flabbergasted after a shipment of 30 toy guns for his store was confiscated by ATF agents in Tacoma.

Brad Martin and his son, Ben, sell the Airsoft BB guns from their store in Cornelius where they’ve been in business for seven years.

The Martins said they buy their stock from Taiwan because the merchandise is less expensive. But the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives seized a shipment of 30 in October. That shipment is worth around $12,000 and the ATF is promising to destroy the entire shipment.

I feel safer already, don’t you? After all, who knows who might have been hurt by these things if some enterprising young felon had gotten their hands on one of these!

Special Agent Kelvin Crenshaw said the toys can be easily retro-fitted into dangerous weapons.

“With minimal work it could be converted to a machine gun,” Crenshaw said.

I’m not the world’s biggest gun expert, but I’m fairly certain that you can’t convert a BB gun into a machine gun. Maybe, with some effort, you could convert one to fire small caliber rounds (I doubt more than a .22), but it would almost certainly be a single shot weapon. But a machine gun? There’s no way that the internal structure of a BB gun would be strong enough to handle that rate of fire.

But even if this absurd premise is true, I can’t think of a legal justification for this seizure off the top of my head. It’s possible, after all, to convert certain semi-automatic rifles to be fully automatic if you know what you’re doing, but you can buy and sell them legally. On the face of it, this looks like a nonsense seizure and if that’s true I hope that the Martins get their property back.

h/t Radley Balko

Steve Chapman runs down Obama’s record on gun control:

On the list of issues for which Obama is willing to put himself on the line, gun control ranks somewhere below free trade with Uzbekistan.

So he has proposed nothing in the way of new federal restrictions on firearms. Even the “assault weapons” ban signed by President Clinton—and allowed to expire in 2004—has no visible place on his agenda.

Not only that, he’s approved changes that should gladden the hearts of gun-rights supporters, a group that includes me. He signed a law permitting guns to be taken into national parks. He signed another allowing guns as checked baggage on Amtrak. He acted to preserve an existing law limiting the use of government information on firearms it has traced.

As a pro-Second Amendment guy, I’m heartened by this. One of the right’s biggest victories in the past twenty years has been to make gun control very politically hard to support–and that’s a good thing.

Image Credit: Really Good Magazine

Amy Bishop Arrested (Bob Gathany / The Huntsville Times)

Neuroscientist Amy Bishop was denied tenure by the biology faculty at the University of Alabama at Huntsville.  So she shot them.

WAFF48:

The woman accused of killing three faculty members at University of Alabama Huntsville has been charged with capital murder.

Police said a female member of the UA-Huntsville faculty shot and killed three co-workers on campus Friday afternoon.

Sources close to the investigation identify the suspect as Dr. Amy Bishop.

Police also have the alleged shooter’s husband in custody. He has not been formally charged with anything.

University spokesman Ray Garner said the three killed were G. K. Podila, the chairman of the Department of Biological Sciences, and two associates, Maria Ragland Davis and Adriel Johnson.

He also said Joseph Leahy is in critical condition at Huntsville Hospital. Stephanie Monticello and Luis Rogelio Cruz-Vera are in stable condition.

Huntsville Police, Madison County Sheriff’s department and HEMSI responded to a shooting at the UAH campus at 4:00 Friday afternoon.

The shooting happened in the Shelby Center, a math and science classroom building.

Authorities said Bishop, during a Biology faculty meeting, learned she would not receive tenure. She then pulled out a gun and started shooting.

NYT:

Three faculty members at the University of Alabama in Huntsville were shot to death, and three other people were seriously wounded at a biology faculty meeting on Friday afternoon, university officials said.  The Associated Press reported that a biology professor, identified as Amy Bishop, was charged with murder.

According to a faculty member, the professor had applied for tenure, been turned down, and appealed the decision. She learned on Friday that she had been denied once again.

The newspaper identified Dr. Bishop as a Harvard-educated neuroscientist. According to a 2006 profile in the newspaper, Dr. Bishop invented a portable cell growth incubator with her husband, Jim Anderson. Police officials said that Mr. Anderson was being detained, but they did not call him a suspect.

[...]

Dr. Bishop had told acquaintances recently that she was worried about getting tenure, said a business associate who met her at a business technology open house at the end of January and asked not to be named because of the close-knit nature of the science community in Huntsville.  “She began to talk about her problems getting tenure in a very forceful and animated way, saying it was unfair,” the associate said, referring to a conversation in which she blamed specific colleagues for her problems.  “She seemed to be one of these persons who was just very open with her feelings,” he said. “A very smart, intense person who had a variety of opinions on issues.”

CNN:

Huntsville Police Chief Henry Reyes left open the possibility that more than one person had been detained. “We have a suspect and possible persons of interest,” he said late Friday. “Until we go through everything, we’re not going to say exactly how many or who we have.”

Huntsville Times:

Dr. Amy Bishop, a Harvard-University trained neuroscientist, was taken into custody, and her husband has been detained. They have not been charged with a crime. Police said they have a suspect in custody but have not named the person.

[...]

In June 2006, The Times published a story involving Bishop, biology professor and her husband, Jim Anderson, chief science officer of Cherokee Labsystems in Huntsville. Bishop is quoted in the story as co-inventor of “InQ,” a new cell growth incubator which promised to cut the costs, size and maintenance involved in the mechanics of cell generation.

Naturally, the tragic and unusual nature of this incident is drawing substantial blogospheric commentary.

Ed Morrissey takes a just-the-facts approach, noting only that he’s surprised that the shooter was a female.  So was I, actually.  

Bob Owens notes that this was clearly “premeditated murder,” since it’s not customary to bring guns to faculty meetings. The Blogprof concurs.

Stacy McCain refrains from his customary snark, given that three are dead and others are seriously injured.  His commenters, not so much, including some odd speculation on the race of the suspect.  (She would appear caucasian.)

Vox Day ties this into the global warming debate and sees this as proof that scientists aren’t rational and objective.   Which, aside from being bizarre and cruel, seems not to match events. After all, the decision to deny Dr. Bishop tenure would seem vindicated.

It’s always baffling to me when people try to politicize random tragedies — usually while they’re breaking news stories with little real information. At first blush, Bishop would seem to be extremely bright — a Harvard-trained neuroscientist doing cutting edge work — but with some serious psychological issues.  My natural tendency in these mass murder situations is to write the shooters off as mentally ill but the seeming premeditation and obvious revenge motives against the victims would seem contrary evidence.

Regardless, however, this tragic, one-off case is unlikely to significantly alter my views on higher education, gun rights, crime and punishment, or global warming.  I’ll post a follow-up if that changes.

Saturday leaving my office, I was the subject of an attempted mugging by a member of the Indianapolis Choir Boy School of Good Men Who are Only Down on Their Luck.  As I was leaving my office, said altar boy came around the corner of my building to the left into the side parking lot, and as I turned to face him noticed the knife in his right hand.  The Chaplain’s Assistant demanded that we engage in an abbreviated barter process, wherein I would provide my wallet and car keys in exchange for not getting shanktified, which to him probably seemed like a reasonable exchange.

I politely demurred by hurling a cup of hot Starbucks at him while fishing my Beretta Jetfire out of the stupid pocket holster it was riding in.  After taking a face full of Columbia’s most popular legal export and confronted with a counter offer of bullets to his previous barter exchange concept, the young gentlemen decided that discretion was the better part of valor and made all due haste in a westerly direction.  For my part, I locked myself in my office, called 911 and waited for the cops to arrive to take my report.

Via Glenn Reynolds, who marvels, “Coffee — is there anything it can’t do?”

Of course, to paraphrase the old saying, you’ll get more with hot coffee and a gun than with hot coffee alone.

JERICHO, Ark. — It was just too much, having to return to court twice on the same day to contest yet another traffic ticket, and Fire Chief Don Payne didn’t hesitate to tell the judge what he thought of the police and their speed traps.

The response from cops? They shot him. Right there in court.

Now the police chief has disbanded his force “until things calm down,” a judge has voided all outstanding police-issued citations and sheriff’s deputies are asking where all the money from the tickets went. With 174 residents, the city can keep seven police officers on its rolls but missed payments on police and fire department vehicles and saw its last business close its doors a few weeks ago.

“You can’t even buy a loaf of bread, but we’ve got seven police officers,” said former resident Larry Harris, who left town because he said the police harassment became unbearable.

But lets not be hasty, these brave men in blue are putting their lives on the line after all.

“When I first moved out here, they wrote me a ticket for going 58 mph in my driveway,” 75-year-old retiree Albert Beebe said.

Well obviously Albert Beebe was going 58 miles per hour in his drive way because why would the police lie. Oh…wait, they aren’t sure where all the traffic fine money went, hmmmm….

It was anger over traffic tickets that brought Payne to city hall last week, said his lawyer, Randy Fishman. After Payne failed to get a traffic ticket dismissed on Aug. 27, police gave Payne or his son another ticket that day. Payne, 39, returned to court to vent his anger to Judge Tonya Alexander, Fishman said.

It’s unclear exactly what happened next, but Martin said an argument between Payne and the seven police officers who attended the hearing apparently escalated to a scuffle, ending when an officer shot Payne from behind.

I’m sure it was totally justified and in line with departmental policies. After all, who knows Payne might have had a pencil or paper clip on him. Those are danerous weapons you know.

Prosecutor Lindsey Fairley said Thursday that he didn’t plan to file any felony charges against the officer or Payne. Fairley, reached at his home, said Payne could face a misdemeanor charge stemming from the scuffle, but that would be up to the city’s judge. He said he didn’t remember the name of the officer who fired the shot.

What a shock the prosecutor backs up the cop who discharges his gun at an unarmed person in a crowded room and also wounds a fellow cop in the process. Police professionalism at its highest.

Alexander, the judge, has voided all the tickets written by the department both inside the city and others written outside of its jurisdiction — citations that the department apparently had no power to write. Alexander, who works as a lawyer in West Memphis, resigned as Jericho’s judge in the aftermath of the shooting, Fairley said. She did not return calls for comment.

Meanwhile, sheriff’s deputies want to know where the money from the traffic fines went. Martin said that it appeared the $150 tickets weren’t enough to protect the city’s finances. Sheriff’s deputies once had to repossess one of the town’s police cruisers for failure to pay on a lease, and the state Forestry Commission recently repossessed one of the city’s fire trucks because of nonpayment.

City hall has been shuttered since the shooting, and any records of how the money was spent are apparently locked inside. No one answered when a reporter knocked on the door on Tuesday.

So lets do a quick recap.

• The police shot an unarmed man from behind when in scuffle with 6 other police officers.
• No charges will be brought against the police officer from the local prosecutor.
• Nobody knows where the money from the various speeding tickets went.
• The police were writing tickets outside their jurisdiction.
• City Hall is shut down.

Anyone doubt that the cops saw this as their own private racket and were using the tickets to line their own pockets? And what is up with the police officers in Jericho? Are they all totally out of shape morons that couldn’t fight their way out of a paper bag? Six of them are scuffling with one man and they can’t subdue him and the seventh feels he has the justification to shoot the “perp”?

Many years ago, political scientists came up with a theory that elites lead public opinion. And on some issues, they clearly do. But on some issues, they don’t. Two examples of the latter phenomenon are conspicuous at a time when Barack Obama enjoys the approval of more than 60 percent of Americans and Democrats have won thumping majorities in two elections in a row. One is global warming. The other is gun control. On both issues, the elites of academe, the media and big business have been solidly on one side for years. But on both, the American public has been moving in the other direction.

One could argue that these are cases where counter-elites are exceedingly well organized and have fought back with counter-propaganda. Regardless, they’re obviously cases where the elites have failed to dominate the debate.

Over the past decade, the Gallup organization has been asking Americans whether the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated or generally correct. From 1998 to 2007, except for the run-up to the 2004 election, they said it was generally serious by roughly a 2-1 margin — 66 to 30 percent in 2006, for example. But in March 2009, that margin slipped to only 57 to 41 percent, with two-thirds of Republicans and nearly half of independents saying concern is exaggerated.

Actually, this is a rather bizarre cherry picking of the data. What the March poll tells us is that people are more concerned about the economy than they are about the environment during the worst economic crisis in generations.  Indeed, Frank Newport‘s report is titled “Americans: Economy Takes Precedence Over Environment – First time majority has supported economy in 25 years of asking question.”

Still, as Newport’s April 2008 report makes clear, the overall concern about global warming has been essentially static for two decades.

This, not the bogus comparison in relative intensity, is a much better indication that the elites have failed to win this battle.  On the other hand, a related question shows the people who think global warming “will pose a serious threat to you or your way of life in your lifetime” has increased from 25 percent to 40 percent over that period.

The difference is even more stark on guns, as Gallup‘s various trendlines show.  The most relevant question has seen a steady decline since 1991:

Furthermore, gun ownership has fluctuated considerably since 1960, starting from a high of 49 percent, going as low as 34 percent in 2000, but is back to 42 percent today.