Revealing. When you drill down to specific gun-control policies, O’s position enjoys majority — and, in the case of background checks, supermajority — support. (Which we already knew, thanks to Pew.) When you start asking people about big-picture gun control, though, you get results like this:

If you’re a congressman from an increasingly rare purplish district who’s thinking of voting for Feinstein’s new AWB, you’ll find little reassurance in numbers like those. And if you’re a House Democrat who spent yesterday afternoon listening to Joe Biden promise that there’s a new national consensus on regulating guns, you’ll find no comfort in this:

A majority of independents back the AWB, a ban on high-capacity magazines, and expanded background checks, yet the NRA leads Obama by double digits when they’re asked who better represents their views on guns. How come? Two reasons, I think. One: Most independents these days lean right (likely a byproduct of some conservatives having grown so disgruntled with the GOP that they’ve left the party), so if you give them a binary choice between the NRA and Obama, they’ll opt for the former — notwithstanding the left’s relentless campaign to demonize and marginalize Wayne LaPierre and crew over the past two months. Makes me wonder what indie support for an AWB would look like if Obama had kept a lower profile in all this. Maybe it would have hit 60 percent. Some gun-control fans have been worried about The One’s counterproductive “leadership” on the issue since the beginning. Two: I think some number of centrists who support particular gun-control policies don’t trust Democrats not to get greedy in the future. Gingrich made this point robustly when he appeared on Piers Morgan’s show a few weeks ago. Some independents may think banning high-capacity magazines is a good idea while also suspecting that O’s restrictionist ambitions are secretly much grander. A heavy majority of the public opposes any outright ban on guns; if you think some Democrats would like to make that happen, however incrementally, then yeah, you might well decide to support the NRA even while supporting some of the gun-control policies they oppose.

Here’s a barely coherent Tony Bennett wondering whether the world might not amass an army to smash the U.S. a la Nazi Germany if we don’t enact some serious gun control post haste. Exit question: Should a guy who once encouraged Americans to support our leader in anything he wants to do really be trafficking in Nazi analogies? Click the image to watch.