As part of an assignment I did for my American Government class, I chose a controversial constitutional topic to compare with other national surveys conducted. My group decided to question our friends and associates regarding the issue of gun control and gun laws. Below you will find a link to the survey we created with Google Docs. Feel free to try it out yourself. You can even see results of others.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1spCLSDU_8R92bvEj3dw4Adj7d6SY15qxgX5_Xav0TzQ/viewform
After comparing our results with national averages, we found that our survey evoked similar responses among LDS people. Here is a small excerpt from our group report.
"One startling difference in our findings was recreation as a reason for owning firearms. The national data showed 13% of the population listing recreation, but our survey group listed 46%. This is a vast difference, and is by far the most massive difference between our data and the national poll. The difference could be traced to a number of factors. One could argue that one factor could be the population distribution of Latter-day Saints. The majority of the United States’ Latter-day Saint population lives in the West, with most living in Utah. Gun laws in the Midwest and West are, in general, much less restrictive than in the rest of the country. One could deduce that because of the availability of both firearms and locations to shoot, firearms have much more recreational value in the Midwest and West than in other regions. As a personal example, growing up in New Jersey, I could not find a place that I could go shooting within two hours of driving. Because of the ease of shooting in Utah, and the large LDS population that lives there, it is logical that recreation was a much more prevalent reason to own a gun in our survey than in the national poll."
You can also follow the link posted below to the Washington Street Journal blog regarding gun control to find out other interesting topics that have to do with gun control.
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2013/11/04/the-gun-debate-turns-to-sunnyvale-california/
