Almost half of Americans feel less safe than they did before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll reported on the eve of the 13th anniversary of September 11, 2001.
Forty-seven percent of 1,000 registered voters believe that United States is less safe than before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon occurred, according to the poll conducted Sept. 3-7.
That's more than twice the level of fear among Americans a year after the attacks, when 20 percent said the country was less safe, and an increase of 19 percentage points from last year, Agence France-Presse reported.
While 26 percent of American voters said they felt about as safe as they did before 9/11, 26 percent believe to be much safer than before.
The poll comes in the wake of Islamic State militants, also known as ISIS and ISIL, gaining vast swaths of land in Syria and Iraq, and recently claiming responsibility for the beheadings of two American journalists.
According to the poll, 61 percent of American voters support the United States taking military action against ISIS, which wants to establish an Islamic state in Syria and Iraq.
But 13 percent disagree, believing that such an action would not be in the United States' best interest. Twenty-four percent said they don't know enough to have an opinion.
However, 40 percent of Americans said U.S. military action against IS should be limited to airstrikes, while 34 percent said they would support airstrikes and the use of combat troops.
In a separate CNN poll released this week, 61 percent of Americans opposed placing U.S. soldiers on the ground in Iraq and Syria to combat ISIS, while 38 percent said they did not oppose the strategy.
"That's a significant shift over a year ago, when a similar NBC/WSJ poll, conducted after widespread reporting that the Syrian government used chemical weapons on its own people, found little support for U.S. military action in Syria," according to AFP. "In that poll, 21 percent of Americans supported military action against Syria, while 33 percent did not."
Although Homeland Security officials testified to Congress on Wednesday that the Islamic States does not pose an immediate threat of an attack inside the United States, it does "have the ability to attack American targets overseas with little or no warning."
But video of the beheadings, disseminated around the world through social media, appears to have had an effect.
According to the recent NBC/WSJ poll, 94 percent of Americans said they had heard about the news of the beheaded journalists - a figure "higher than any other news event" the poll has measured over the past five years.
