Most people who support gun control wrongly think that gun violence has increased in recent years, a new survey found.
According to a Rasmussen poll, 64 percent of people who favor stricter regulations on gun ownership mistakenly believe that crime rates have gone up in the last 20 years.
In truth, the opposite has happened. Gun violence plummeted by nearly 50 percent between 1993 and 2010, according to a recent study by the Pew Research Center.
“Most Americans recognize that there are more gun owners in the United States today than there were 20 years ago but don’t know that gun crime in the country has gone down in that same period of time,” wrote the authors of the Rasmussen survey.
The mistaken view was most pronounced among respondents who identified as Democrats. Some 54 percent thought that gun violence had increased in the past 20 years. Only 29 percent of Republicans and 25 percent of independents held this inaccurate view.
A recent Pew poll found that 56 percent of Americans in general believed gun crime had increased.
Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.