BuzzFeed: “Gun owners who are members of the National Rifle Association and those who are not are sharply divided over support for new gun control proposals, according to a new Ipsos/BuzzFeed News poll. A slew of new proposals have come out of Congress and the White House in the weeks since 17 people were killed in a school shooting in Parkland, Florida. President Donald Trump has personally suggested ideas ranging from limiting access to certain types of guns to arming teachers or professionals within schools. Some ideas have more buy-in with gun owners than others. Approximately 76% of gun owners who are not members of the NRA said they’d support raising the minimum age for buying a high-capacity semi-automatic rifle like an AR-15 from 18 to 21. That proposal even has substantial backing among gun-owning NRA members: 53% support it, with only 25% strongly opposed…” [The Ipsos/BuzzFeed News poll was conducted online between March 1 and 6 and questioned 1,052 gun owners in the US 18 and older, including 175 who said that they were NRA members and 877 who said they were not. According to Ipsos, the poll has a credibility interval of plus or minus 8.4 percentage points for NRA members and plus or minus 3.8 percentage points for nonmembers. The poll has a credibility interval of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points for all respondents.]

“Among gun owners, just 16% report that they are a member of the NRA. Views of the NRA are quite different between members and non-members [emphasis added]. 46% of all gun owners believe the NRA is an important defender of Second Amendment rights, but NRA members (77%) and non-members (40%) display a big disparity in this belief. 27% of non-members even go so far as to spurn the NRA as a reflection of their beliefs or interests as a gun owner. NRA membership also impacts support for a number of policies across the board, namely raising the legal gun ownership age from 18 to 21 and raising the minimum age to buy high-capacity semi-automatic rifles to 21. 40% of NRA members believe in raising the legal gun ownership age and 53% support raising the minimum age to 21 for buying high-capacity semi-automatic rifles. Comparatively, non-members support these proposed policies at rates of 64% and 76%, respectively. NRA members also report owning more guns compared to non-members. 17% of Americans report owning more than 5 guns, but 38% of NRA members report so compared to 13% of non-members.

See also Pew Research Center – 5 facts about the NRA and guns in America…there are only 5 million members of the NRA [are you surprised?]

There are reported to be over 327 million guns in America…”There’s a gun for every man, woman, and child, more or less,” says Deborah Azrael of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center.” Once again, there are about 5 million members of the NRA.