Brits want handgun ban repealed, says newspaper poll

An overwhelming majority of British citizens want their country’s handgun ban repealed, according to the results of an on-line poll conducted by the Daily Telegraph, described Wednesday as the United Kingdom’s “most widely read broadsheet newspaper” by the Commentator.

As this column was updated Thursday, more than 14,900 votes had been cast in the unscientific poll, and of those, 12,603support a repeal of the 1997 gun ban, an 84.35 percent vote. It far out-distanced votes for several other measures that Britons would like to see introduced in the House of Commons, according to the newspaper.

For anti-gunners on both sides of the Atlantic, it is a devastating rejection of the gun ban philosophy. The ban was enacted following the Dunblane school massacre. The Commentator noted, “While gun crime soared after the British ban in 1997, rates of gun violence have fallen, especially in British cities, following more spending by police forces into tackling gun crime. Police in England and Wales recorded 5,911 firearms offences in 2011/12, a reduction of 42 percent compared with nine years earlier, according to the Office for National Statistics.”

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