A recent Pew Reasearch poll is being touted by Politico because it reveals that a slight majority (52%) of people living in the United States now support stricter gun laws, with 34% supporting much stricter gun laws. Unsurprisingly, non-gun owners favor tighter gun restrictions (62%) than gun owners (29%). Also unsurprisingly, a large majority of Republicans (76%) believe guns rights are more important than gun restrictions, while just 22% of Democrats agree with them.

If we look more closely at the numbers we find that 3 in 10 adults are armed. But the numbers vary greatly by sex, race and region. Pew reports that 39% of men are armed as compared to 22% of women. And 36% of Whites are armed, as compared to 24% of Blacks and just 15% of Hispanics. In the South 36% of people own a gun, followed by the Midwest at 32%, the West at 31% and the Northeast at just 16%. This means that Southerners are more than twice as likely to be armed as Northerners. Finally, 46% of rural people are armed, as opposed to 28% of suburbanites and just 19% of urbanites. The moral of this story? It should be relatively easy to crush the urbanite.