What Percent Of Americans Want Gun Control

Supporters of gun control measures gather at the Legislative Office Building in Agree, Northward.H., in August, to urge Republican Gov. Chris Sununu to human action afterward mass shootings in Texas and Ohio. Michael Casey/AP hide caption

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Michael Casey/AP

Supporters of gun control measures gather at the Legislative Role Edifice in Concord, N.H., in August, to urge Republican Gov. Chris Sununu to act after mass shootings in Texas and Ohio.

Michael Casey/AP

The percentage of Americans who favor stricter gun laws is on the rise, though significant partisan divisions persist. A Pew Enquiry Center survey conducted in September plant that lx% of Americans say gun laws should be tougher, upward from 57% last year and 52% in 2017.

The study, released this week, indicates that while a solid bulk of Americans favor stricter gun laws, back up remains separate down party lines. Lxxx-six percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said gun laws should exist stricter than they are today, compared with 31% of their Republican counterparts.

Big majorities of Democrats and Republicans somewhat or strongly support disallowment people with mental illnesses from purchasing guns, every bit well as making individual gun sales and sales at gun shows subject to background checks. But when information technology comes to banning high-capacity ammunition magazines and assail-style weapons, the parties diverge: Virtually 9 in ten Democrats favor each of these proposals, compared with roughly half of Republicans.

Gun control remains at the forefront of the national conversation in the wake of several mass shootings in the past two years, including those in Las Vegas; Sutherland Springs, Texas; Parkland, Fla.; Pittsburgh; One thousand Oaks, Calif.; Virginia Beach, Va.; El Paso, Texas; Dayton, Ohio; and Midland-Odessa, Texas.

The number of states with red flag or extreme-risk laws, which allow courts to order the seizure of firearms from those believed to pose an imminent danger to themselves or others, has increased since the 2018 schoolhouse shooting in Parkland, Fla., that left 17 people dead and 17 others injured. Before Parkland, but 5 states had red flag laws. By August 2019, 17 states and the Commune of Columbia had adopted them.

An APM Research Lab survey released in August institute widespread national approval of blood-red flag laws, with 77 per centum of Americans supporting family-initiated extreme run a risk protection orders and 70 pct in support of those initiated by the police.

Cassandra Crifasi, deputy managing director of the Johns Hopkins Centre for Gun Policy and Enquiry, told NPR in August that fifty-fifty people who more often than not oppose gun control might favor red flag laws because they are temporary and specific.

Protection orders "take guns out of the hands of those who should non have them without infringing on the rights of law-abiding gun owners," Dr. Marking Rosenberg, who oversaw gun violence enquiry at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told NPR in Baronial.

The human relationship between gun control and gun rights is one of the questions explored in the Pew survey. Overall, it plant that 53 percent of Americans believe it is more of import to control gun ownership, while 47 per centum say it is more important to protect the right of Americans to ain guns. Men are more likely to favor protecting gun rights, while women are more than likely to favor decision-making gun ownership.

The study's release comes just days after California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bundle of 15 bills related to gun violence prevention.

"Information technology'southward non about solving individual problems, information technology's about changing the dynamic, changing the tendency lines," Newsom said as he signed the bills.

Despite growing national support for stricter gun laws, such legislation still generates controversy. One of these bills, AB 61, is facing criticism from both the National Rifle Association and the American Civil Liberties Union for expanding California's ruddy flag law. It will enable employers, co-workers, employees and teachers — not simply family members and police officers — to seek gun violence restraining orders from people they see as posing a potential threat.

The ACLU believes this law "poses a significant threat to civil liberties" and has voiced concern that people in this expanded category may lack "the relationship or skills required to make an appropriate assessment." The NRA described the new laws as "standing the set on on our Second Amendment rights in the Golden State."

There were 57,473 gun violence incidents in 2018, according to the Gun Violence Archive, an contained data collection and research group that collects gun violence numbers from law enforcement, media, government, and commercial sources.

Rachel Treisman is an intern on NPR's National Desk.

Pew results come from a survey of 9,895 U.Southward. adults conducted from Sept. 3 to Sept. 15. The margin of sampling error for the full sample of 9,895 respondents is 1.5 percentage points.