Public Rejects Bans to Fight Terrorism
by Dave Workman
Senior Editor
A new poll conducted by Zogby International shows that an overwhelming majority of Americans reject the notion that gun bans would reduce the threat from terrorism.
The poll was conducted from Mar. 30 through Apr. 1 for the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF). Zogby conducted interviews of 1,009 likely voters selected at random around the country with a margin of error of plus/minus 3.2%.
SAF Founder Alan Gottlieb said the results of this poll clearly show that anti-gunners trying to use terrorism as an excuse to pass more restrictive gun laws are out of step with the American public.
“It’s been pretty clear for a long time,” he quipped, “that gun grabbers don’t have a genuine clue. All they want to do is take guns away from people, any guns, all guns, and they don’t care how much blood they dance through or how much false hysteria they spread to get the job done.”
Rejection of gun bans as a tool against terrorism ran pretty consistently across all sub-groups in the poll, according to Zogby. Only one in five persons contacted suggested that gun bans might thwart terrorists. Five percent of those responding were not sure whether bans would work or not.
The most likely to disagree, according to Zogby’s results, were Republicans. They rejected the gun ban notion by an overwhelming 85%, along with those identified as Protestants, parents with children over age 17, residents of rural areas and men.
Whites, by a 78% margin, were more likely than African Americans, by a 64% margin, to disagree. Fifty-five percent of Hispanics also thought gun bans would not work.
Significantly, only one out of three persons who identified themselves as Democrats thought gun bans would work. The majority of registered Democrats still rejected the idea.
Continuing the breakdown of sub-groups, conservatives reject gun bans as an anti-terrorism measure by a whopping 82.4%, and even those describing themselves as liberals disagree by a margin of 68.4%, while only 25.7% agreed. Libertarians oppose the idea by 86.7%.
According to Zogby, those who agree with the idea were more likely to be senior citizens, Catholics, residents of the Eastern United States, large cities and suburbs, women and people with annual household incomes less than $15,000 and in the $35,000 to $45,000 income group. However, that’s only part of the story, because even in those sub-groups, the majorities were still against gun bans.
Only about one out of four Catholics (27.7%) agreed with the idea that gun bans would help stop terrorists, while 67.4% disagreed. That was less than Muslims, among whom 75% disagreed with the idea, while among Jews, 66.8% disagreed.
Gottlieb noted the significance of the across-the-board rejection of gun bans as a tool to fight terrorism. He said this signals a growing rejection of anti-gun activism even among some groups that have traditionally supported gun controls.
He said the gun control “track record” is pretty well-established, and that it is repeatedly shown to be lacking.
“Look at their track record,” Gottlieb noted. “Anti-gunners have used every excuse, every tragic event, to demand increasingly restrictive gun laws. They pushed gun bans to stop urban crime, but look how that has failed in places like Washington, DC, and Chicago. They pressed for a gun free school zones law but that hasn’t stopped tragedies like Columbine and, more recently, Red Lake High School in Minnesota. And lately they’ve tried to gull America into supporting bans on certain firearms as a way to thwart terrorism.”
“America,” he said, “has finally awakened to what is essentially a one-note campaign being waged against their gun rights. Present anti-gunners with a problem and their only solution is to take guns away from law-abiding citizens. Well, that’s not a solution, it’s a sham. Whatever else terrorists happen to be, they are criminals, and you do not stop criminals by disarming their intended victims. Average Americans have figured this out.”
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