A gun ban goes down hard

I'm not a big Second Amendment guy, but I'm more sympathetic to the cause than most of the gun control drivel I hear. So I was interested in the story I read yesterday about Brazil's referendum on a proposed gun ban.

Brazil, with 100 million fewer residents than the United States, suffered almost 40,000 gun deaths last year compared to 30,000 in the US. A gun buy-back plan brought in more than 400,000 weapons last year, which was followed by an 8 percent drop in gun-related homicides. Brazilian gun-control groups were so encouraged by this that they worked with the legislature to go whole-hog for a total ban.

The ban would have outlawed the sale of any guns or ammunition to anyone who wasn't a police officer or military member. Early polls showed it passing by large margins (like 70-30). However, it failed by 65-35, and the most interesting thing to me was this line in Friday's story by the Christian Science Monitor:

More than 70 percent of those polled in August said they would vote for the ban, but results released last week showed that those planning to vote no . . . had shot up — especially among the well-off and best educated.

If it was the reverse — that the poor and uneducated were supporting the ban in large numbers — I suspect the anti-gun elites would be proclaiming the stupidity of the Brazilian populace. Too bad for them that it didn't work that way.