We know that many vocal anti-gun advocates live in a state of fear of firearms—that regardless of human intent, they don’t want to see them or be anywhere near them. It turns out that most Americans don’t share that irrational phobia. A recent poll from online service YouGov established that 52 percent of Americans report a feeling of comfort with seeing properly holstered firearms carried in public. Just shy of half of the surveyed population trusts the “average American” with a gun, which probably says as much about their perception of “average” as it does about their feelings toward guns.
We’d like to see those numbers improve, but it says a lot that the image of firearms seen freely on the street—the fear of which is trumpeted hysterically by anti-gunners—is actually not something that Americans in general are very concerned about.
