From: VTGUNS@

Subject: Public Supports Right to Bear Arms

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This was forwarded from one of the folks on the list.
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A liberal group called the Freedom Forum ran a survey recently that was
focused primarily on the 1st Amendment. However, it also includes a few
questions about the 2nd Amendment to which the answers are most gratifying
to us gunowners — and, predictably enough, the mainstream press is notably
silent.

Prof. Eugene Volokh, a UCLA Law School professor specializing in
Constitutional law and no great lover of firearms himself, operates a “blog”
on the web and commented on this the other day, the text of which is
included below. He has authored such 2nd-amendment related works as “The
Commonplace Second Amendment”.

The Freedom Forum report that Volokh refers to can be downloaded in PDF
format from this URL:
http://www.freedomforum.org/publications/first/sofa/2002/
SOFA-2002_report.pdf

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URL:
http://volokh.blogspot.com/2002_09_08_volokh_archive.html#85435326

[Eugene Volokh, 1:04 PM ]

LIBERAL GROUP FINDS THAT 79% OF AMERICANS BELIEVE “THE RIGHT TO OWN FIREARMS”
IS “ESSENTIAL” (48%) OR “IMPORTANT” (31%). Yup, that’s what the Freedom Forum
First Amendment Center’s State of the First Amendment 2002 survey (1012
respondents) finds. What’s the more, the number is up from 64%
in 1997 (33% essential, 31% important) to 79% in 2002 (48% essential, 31%
important).

The report is the source of the soundbites that support for the First
Amendment is supposedly declining; the situation is more complex than that,
it turns out, and I plan on blogging some more about this. But to my
knowledge not one media outlet has reported on the right-to-bear-arms
findings (I did a LEXIS NEWS;CURNWS search for (FIRST AMENDMENT CENTER OR
STATE OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT OR FREEDOM FORUM) AND (BEAR ARMS OR OWN
FIREARMS) and didn’t find a single story that reported on this survey).

Yes, I know that the right to own firearms is in the Second Amendment, not
the First; the survey was mostly about the First Amendment and related
issues, but it also asked about the right to own firearms, and “the right
to privacy” (though it’s impossible to tell exactly how people interpreted
the latter question, since “privacy” is such a vague term).