The gun control issue has become prominent over the past fifty years, as gun users carried out political assassinations, assassination attempts, and violent crimes. Americans mourned the deaths of President John Kennedy; his brother, presidential candidate Robert Kennedy; and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. Presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan were victimized by would-be assassins,…
Some Americans are convinced that more federal regulation of firearms is necessary to reduce the number of murders and injuries that are inflicted with guns and to ensure a safer, more civilized society. Others who support private ownership of guns insist that the right to bear arms is guaranteed by long-standing custom and by the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. These gun rights advocat…
Public opinion polls, like all sources of information, must be used with care. Pollsters select sample populations because it is impossible to interview every American on a given question. The selection is usually performed randomly, a process made easier today by computers. Most major pollsters interview between one thousand and two thousand people to establish a valid sample. Other pollsters may…
A ten-year overview of the public's attitudes about the issues government ought to be addressing is presented by the U.S. Department of Justice in its publication Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics. The most recent data available is for 2002. In 1993 fewer than 0.5% of adults polled mentioned gun control spontaneously as an issue the government ought to be addressing. In 1995, 2% of …
Pollsters from several organizations have periodically surveyed the public for its opinion on gun control measures. Discussed below are poll data on gun control issues from three organizations: the Harris Poll, the Gallup Organization, and the National Opinion Research Center. Harris Poll gauged the public's attitude on gun control laws on September 24, 2004. One question was, "In ge…
Polls consistently show support for stricter gun controls, yet little legislation has successfully made its way through Congress. The Harris Poll's Humphrey Taylor pondered this in his online essay dated May 13, 2000 ("The Gun Control Enigma," http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll [accessed September 28, 2004]). The problem, he wrote, is political. Taylor noted that eve…
Many Americans express concern about juvenile crime. Peter T. Elikann and Marc Klaas point out in their book Superpredators: The Demonization of Our Children by the Law (New York: Perseus Publishing, 1999) that at the height of the youth crime wave (1983 to 1993), young people were not committing more acts of violence than they had in the past, but the acts they committed were more lethal. A 1997 …
How many adults are so concerned about crime that they turn to guns for self-defense? According to a 2001 poll, 21% of respondents bought guns and 11% carried guns for self-defense. (See Table 8.3.) Larger percentages chose to avoid certain locations, to install special locks or burglar alarms in their homes, or to keep a dog. In an ABC News/Court TV poll (March 2001), respondents ranked "c…
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