They shoot the messenger

How deep can distrust run?

When you're talking about the nation's president and guns, pretty darn deep. In some cases, you can even quantify it.

In January, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found that a distinct majority of Republicans favor the major tenets of proposed reforms. For instance:

* The poll showed 89 percent of Republicans favor gun show background checks.

* It showed that 69 percent agree that background checks should be done on people buying ammunition.

* A majority (59 percent) of Republicans polled supports bans on high-capacity magazines.

But pollsters also discovered that 72 percent of those questioned oppose Obama's push for reform - even though Obama is seeking the same changes Republicans favor in the bullet points above.

Sometimes it's hard to separate distrust or flat-out dislike of a person from the idea that person is suggesting, but as a country, that's what we need to do if we're going to move forward. And we need to do it on far more issues than guns; the next budget crisis is knocking at the door, for example.

In the meantime, here are just a few U.S. gun facts we hope you find interesting.

* There have been 14 mass shootings since 2000. In all 14, the perpetrators used a high-capacity magazine.

* High-capacity magazines do not mean the semiautomatic assault weapons used in mass shootings like Newtown and Aurora, Colo., sprayed fire. These were single-fire weapons.

* Between 2005 and 2010, 1.4 million guns were stolen during burglaries and other property crimes. Only 20 percent of them were recovered.

* From 2007 to 2011, 3,041 people were killed by a firearm while committing a felony. Of that total, police officers killed 1,965; the remaining 1,076 were killed by private citizens.

* Assault weapons draw the most fire from critics, but in 2011, according to the FBI, 323 murders were committed by rifle shot. More than twice as many people (728) were killed by fists, and 6,220 murders were committed with handguns.