Gun control has been a major point of this election season, and not just for presidential candidates. Up and down the ballot, the debate around restricting the right to keep and bear arms is a topic of discussion.

Obviously, it’s a key topic for us here at Bearing Arms for what should be blindingly obvious reasons, but we’ve seen it come up at pretty much every publication out there as well. After to assassination attempts and a mass shooting in the last few months, the punditry is most definitely focused on the issue.

Yet it doesn’t seem to be the main issue bothering most voters. That is something entirely different.

The economy ranks as the top political issue in the 2024 campaign, polls show.

For Republicans, immigration reform is also topping the priority lists. For Democrats, it’s reproductive rights and health care.

Further below ranks gun control or gun violence, even while mass shootings continue to dominate and then slowly disappear from the headlines. Most recently there has been the Sept. 4 shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia, which killed four people and injured nine; and Saturday night’s shooting at the Five Points South entertainment district in Birmingham, which also left four dead and 17 injured.

“When it comes to thinking about policy, the American public is pulled in so many different directions,” said Jennifer Selin, associate professor law at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University. “While some things, like the economy, tend to affect people on a daily basis and thus are a little more tangible to them, other things, like national gun policy, tend to be most salient after a tragedy.”

Why does it trail

For most experts on gun control and policy in the U.S., the issue – while remaining as among the top policy concerns in this political season – trails behind the top issues even as hundreds of people are shot and killed daily. Mental health policy, which is often a Republican answer to gun violence, often does not rank in the polling of the most salient issues in 2024.

A Cygnal poll last month showed gun control in eighth place ranking behind a list of other policy issues and far behind inflation/economy, immigration, and threats to democracy. Pew Research Center has gun policy ranked seventh, far behind the economy and health care.

The supposed experts give a lot of reasons for this, including an “uneven distribution of violence,” which is certainly fair. Some parts of our society are extremely violent, where some folks know multiple murder victims from different shootings while others in the same city are isolated from it. We know that most homicides are centered in a handful of neighborhoods, typically the neighborhoods you don’t want to drive through at night.

Another suggestion is that gun control advocates are unsure if their preferred policies will survive judicial review. However, I’ll note that it never stopped them before and I don’t see that one being a major issue.

The truth of the matter is that if you think about the fact that for most people, violent crime is something on the news, but high grocery bills are something they see every week, it’s not difficult to see where their priorities are going to be.

That’s likely to be especially true when anti-gun voices try to demonize guns as a thing and a lot of these people have guns in their homes that don’t represent a threat to literally anyone except those who might break in.

Overall, most people just want to be left alone to live their lives. They don’t want the government to meddle in what they do on a day-to-day basis. They might be fine with them meddling in other people’s lives–that’s the big problem in American politics these days, really, because they don’t want to just do it when someone is being harmed, but in general–but they want to be left alone themselves.

Yet things like the economy, which the government is responsible for screwing up most of the time, are cases when they’re not being left alone.

Gun policy, on the other hand, requires the government to meddle. For some, that’s a feature rather than a bug, but a lot of people just can’t be bothered to make that a major issue for them even so.

The problem, however, is that this is such a low issue for voters who it should matter more to, namely gun owners. We need to fix that and fix it fast, because it’s only a matter of time before it becomes the driving issue of an election.