ACROSS AMERICA — Polls show Americans’ support for stricter gun laws is waning as President Joe Biden pushes Congress to enact new restrictions before Democrats lose their majority in the House.
A new Gallup poll showed support for gun reform sharply increased after the May 24 Uvalde elementary school shooting, in which 19 children and two adults were slaughtered. At that time, 66 percent of U.S. adults think laws covering the sale of firearms should be tightened.
That’s down to 57 percent in the most recent poll, conducted Oct. 3-20. But support for gun reform is still higher than it was in October 2021, when 52 percent of U.S. adults wanted stricter laws.
Gallup has tracked Americans’ attitudes on gun laws since 1990, when 78 percent of poll respondents said they wanted stricter laws for gun sales. The lowest support for gun reform — 43 percent — was measured in October 2011.
The latest poll was completed before the Nov. 14 University of Virginia mass shooting that left four people dead; the Nov. 19 shooting rampage at Club Q in Colorado Springs in which five people were killed and 17 were injured; and the Nov. 23 Virginia Walmart shooting in which an employee killed six people and injured as many more before turning a gun on himself.
Support for tighter gun control often spikes after prominent shootings, then declines as memories of the event fade, Gallup noted. That pattern could work to Biden’s advantage as he renews his call for Congress to ban high-powered assault weapons that have the capacity to kill many people very quickly.
“When will we decide we’ve had enough?” Biden said in a statement after the mass killing at the gay nightclub in Colorado Springs. “We need to enact an assault weapons ban to get weapons of war off America’s streets.”
And on Thanksgiving Day, he said, “The idea we still allow semi-automatic weapons to be purchased is sick. Just sick. I’m going to try to get rid of assault weapons.”
“Assault weapons” is an inexact term that applies to a group of high-powered guns or semi-automatic long rifles, including an AR-15 that can fire 30 rounds of ammunition without reloading — a gun that’s twice as powerful as the handguns carried by New York City Police Department officers, according to a report by the Associated Press.
After Uvalde school massacre and Buffalo supermarket shooting that killed 10 Black people, Congress passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which strengthens background checks for the youngest firearms buyers, expands the definition of a gun seller, imposes new penalties on gun traffickers, and provides billions of dollars to states and local communities to improve school safety and mental health initiatives.
Additionally, the legislation provided $750 million in funding to the 19 states that have “red flag” laws that make it easier for local authorities to temporarily take firearms away from people determined in courts to be dangerous, and to other states that have violence prevention programs.
The legislation provides the most first significant curbs on firearms since the 1994 assault weapons ban, which was allowed to sunset after 10 years.
With the midterm election over and no clear electoral consequences resulting from the earlier legislation, emboldened Democrats are again pushing the federal assault weapons ban. It passed the Democratic-led House in July, and Biden has pushed the ban nearly everywhere he campaigned this year.
Democrats kept control of the Senate in the midterms, and Republicans were only able to claim the slimmest House majority in two decades. Still, resurrecting the 1994 assault weapons ban will be a tough sell.
High-powered assault weapons, banned for a decade in the United States, are now the weapon of choice among young men responsible for many of the most devastating mass shootings, including those in Uvalde, Buffalo and during the 4th of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois.
The guns have been used in other notorious mass shootings — the Sandy Hook massacre, the San Bernardino shooting in 2015, the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016, the Sutherland Springs church shooting in 2017, the Parkland school shooting in 2018, the El Paso Walmart shooting in 2019, the Boulder supermarket shooting in 2021, and the Oxford school shooting in Michigan, also in 2021.
Gallup said it’s unclear how much the recent legislation and proposed legislation affected Americans’ support for tighter gun laws. But Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat who has been the Senate’s leading advocate for stronger gun control since the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre that killed 20 children at a school in Newtown, told the AP he thinks “the American public has been waiting for this message.”
“There has been a thirst from voters, especially swing voters, young voters, parents, to hear candidates talk about gun violence, and I think Democrats are finally sort of catching up with where the public has been,” Murphy said.
Another poll, AP VoteCast’s extensive survey of more than 94,000 midterm elections voters nationwide, found that 3 in 10 voters want gun policy kept as is. Only about 14 percent favor loser gun laws.
Both the Gallup and AP VoteCast polls found clear partisan divides.
The Gallup poll found 86 percent of Democrats, 60 percent of independents and 27 percent of Republicans say laws regulating gun sales should be more strict, but support has fallen in all three partisan groups since June. The greatest decreases in support were among Republicans (11 percentage points), but support also fell among Democrats (8 percentage points) and independence (6 percentage points).
Notably, support among independents for stricter laws is 14 points higher than a year ago, while Democrats’ support is 5 points lower. Republicans’ support remains essentially unchanged.
The AP VoteCast poll conducted for the Associated Press by NORC at the University of Chicago found about 9 in 10 Democrats want stricter gun laws, compared with 3 in 10 Republicans. About half of Republicans said gun laws should be left as they are, and only about a quarter of them want to see them loosened.
The 1994 assault weapons ban was allowed to expire in 2004 after backers in Congress ere unable to muster the political support to counter the powerful gun lobby.
When he was governor of Florida, current Republican Sen. Rick Scott signed gun control laws in the wake of mass shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and a nightclub in Orlando. But he has consistently opposed weapons bans, arguing like many of his Republican colleagues that most gun owners use them lawfully.
“People are doing the right thing, why would we take away their weapons?” Scott asked as the Senate was negotiating gun legislation last summer. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
He said more mental health counseling, assessments of troubled students and law enforcement on campus make more sense.
“Let’s focus on things that actually would change something,” Scott said.
Law enforcement officials have long called for stricter gun laws, arguing that the availability of these weapons makes people less safe and makes their jobs more dangerous.
Mike Moore, chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, the country’s third-largest, told the AP it just makes sense to talk about guns when gun violence is rising nationwide, and consider what the government can do to make the streets safer. He is grateful Biden is bringing it up so much.
“This isn’t a one-and-done,” Moore said of the shooting in Colorado Springs. “These things are evolving all the time, in other cities, at any moment another incident happens. It’s crying out for the federal government, for our legislators, to go out and make this change,” he said.
The most recent multi-casualty shootings are among hundreds of lower profile mass shootings in 2022, according to the Gun Violence Archive, an independent data collection and research group that keeps a running tally of gun violence, collecting information from more than 7,500 law enforcement, media, government and commercial sources.
Under its definition, a mass shooting is one in which four or more people, excluding the shooter, are injured or killed. As of Sunday, there have been 616 mass shootings in 2022, according to that measure.
The Associated Press contributed reporting.
The common denominator in gun violence is that it happens in towns and neighborhoods across the country to people we know. It touches our communities in multiple ways, from children who pick up their parents’ handguns and accidentally shoot themselves to adolescents who end their lives with handguns to mass shootings. In this series, Patch explores those and other ways gun violence impacts our lives, and what is being done to make our communities safer.
Do you have a story idea for this series? Email beth.dalbey@patch.com.
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