San Francisco: Two in three California residents worry about becoming a victim of gun violence in the wake of the recent spike in mass shootings both in the state and around the US, a new poll revealed.
The poll was conducted by the Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS) at the University of California, Berkeley and co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Times and published on Tuesday.
It revealed that about 63 per cent of the registered voters in the most populous U. state, home to around 40 million residents, express worries that they or someone close to them could become the victim of gun violence, with 30 per cent very worried and 33 per cent somewhat worried, reports Xinhua news agency.
The poll, which surveyed over 7,500 California registered voters online from February 14-20, found that demographically, women, persons of colour and voters living in urban areas are more likely than men, whites and rural Californians to hold such concerns.
While majorities of both urban and suburban voters attach greater importance to imposing more controls on gun ownership, rural voters are more divided, with 42 per cent holding this view.
The poll also revealed that there are large partisan differences with regard to these fears.
Democrats are more than twice as likely as Republicans to express these concerns, with 78 per cent of Democrats saying they worry about this compared to 36 per cent among Republicans.
“While other studies have shown Republicans to express similar fears of crime as Democrats, it is striking that they report being less threatened by gun violence than their Democratic counterparts,” said IGS co-director Eric Schickler.
“This underscores how deep party polarisation regarding guns is in California, and in the US more broadly,” he added.
In January, California witnessed back-to-back mass shootings.
On January 21 during a Lunar New Year Celebration in suburban Monterey Park, just west of Los Angeles, a mass shooting incident left 11 people dead.
Another attack on January 23 left four dead at a California mushroom farm in Half Moon Bay. That night, another shooting, this time in Oakland, left one dead and seven others injured.
As of February, the Gun Violence Archive has counted 80 mass shootings in the US this year. Seven of them involved four or more fatalities.
Last year, the group counted 647 mass shootings. Of those, 21 involved five or more fatalities.
–IANS
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