This week’s YouGov/Economist national survey, conducted Thursday through Monday and thus entirely after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, asked respondents the very timely and appropriate question of “Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? ‘I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights,'” to which just 30 percent of respondents overall said they agree to 52 percent saying they disagreed, and 19 percent were unsure.

Among Trump 2024 voters 55 percent agreed, 26 percent disagreed, and 19 percent were unsure while just 11 percent of former Vice President Kamala Harris’s voters agreed versus 81 percent disagreeing and 8 percent unsure. Now maybe these questions can only be so long due to space limitations and/or it’s simply prudent polling to keep them as short as possible but the context of the quote might’ve been useful. At the very least maybe YouGov could’ve A/B tested a subsample with another version of the question mentioning that Kirk said it at a 2023 TPUSA event held just days after three schoolchildren and three teachers were massacred at the Covenant School in Nashville.

There’s another dimension that’d be pretty much impossible to squeeze into a polling question but is still worth mentioning here: Absent that context and put into a different one it’s not the most unreasonable thing to say. Kirk naturally was pushing for the maximal version of the “molon labe” circlejerk – which has always been stupid because you can’t just buy a grenade launcher or tactical nuke at Bass Pro Shops – as right wingers are wont to do when confronted with the grievous toll of their “policy objectives” on gun rights. But you can take his words and put it in a more apt and accessible analogy of speed limits you can maybe start to understand why 11 percent of Harris voters agreed (if they weren’t trolling in the wake of Kirk being freshly added to “some gun deaths”).

Like if YouGov asked respondents whether they agree with the statement that some traffic accident fatalities are worth the cost of not reducing the speed limit on every public road in America to 30 mph, they’d probably get very close to if not 100 percent agreeing. It’s a trade-off most rational, ethical people accept. That would probably lower the annual death toll to something like mid-three-digits nationally but it would waste so much freaking gas and more importantly time – not to mention piss everyone off via speeding tickets every time they drove past a camera at 31 mph.

And if Democrats ahve ever tried mapping that analogy out to voters and then bringing it full circle with “Republican gun policy is like a 175 mph speed limit, we just want to bring it down to a more reasonable 70 mph to save lives” then they’ve done a piss poor job of propagating it.

Anyway, speaking of “context,” the poll also asked this…

…which is sort of a different take than the one 45 percent of Republican respondents gave to a snap YouGov poll conducted on the evening of January 6, 2021…

Also, regarding a completely different context, YouGov also asked this questions this week:

…and this related one…

There’s that “not sure” with Trump voters again.