The latest available gallup polling (done early this year) supposedly reveals the following about American attitudes on guns:

73 percent believe the Second Amendment guarantees individuals the right to own guns;

68 percent oppose banning handguns while 30 percent favor doing so;

One-third of Americans own a gun;

49 percent think gun laws should be stricter, 36 percent think they are strict enough and 11 percent want them relaxed; and

The percentage that favors stricter gun laws has fallen steadily since 9/11.

Some of these results are interesting; others are downright worthless. It is interesting that multiple polls over a number of decades have shown that the great majority of Americans believe they have a right to acquire and own guns. The importance of this is minimal. After all, it is the courts that decide what the Second Amendment means, not the voters.

What these polls do reinforce, however, is a cautionary note about gun bans for politicians who might think they will reduce crime.

These polls make it clear that enacting gun bans would produce disobedience by vast numbers of American gun owners who think the bans infringe their constitutional rights. (Gallup finds that virtually all admitted gun owners believe the Second Amendment gives them a right to arms.) So instead of reducing violence problems, banning guns would squander scarce law enforcement resources by redirecting them against vast numbers of people who are no danger to anyone.

A further implication of the results of the poll is that, insofar as gun bans are put to a vote, most voters would be opposed. Of course, how people answer when immediately confronted by a pollster may differ from how they would vote after the value of a gun ban has been debated in a long electoral campaign.

Some decades ago, the anti-gun movement was misled by Gallup and other pollsters into believing that most Americans are strongly anti-gun. So the anti-gun movement sponsored referenda in America's two most liberal states (California in 1982 and Massachusetts in 1976).

At the outset, polls showed strong majorities in favor of severely anti-handgun proposals in both states. But the result after the states' prolonged electoral debates on these proposals was an utter disaster for the anti-gun movement. In both states the proposals lost by overwhelming majorities.

Vast sums were expended by each side in the California referendum, but the anti-gun argument proved far less innately persuasive to the voters. University of Illinois sociologist David Bordua calculated the difference this way: The pro-gun side had to spend roughly $150,000 for each percent of the electorate it persuade, but the anti-gun side had to spend well over $1 million for each percent of the electorate it persuaded.