Fifty-Five Percent Want Stricter Gun Laws, Fifty-Six Percent Feel More Concealed Firearms Makes Us Safer  Matt Vespa | Oct 20, 2015        

                   

Gallup released a series of poll on the Second Amendment and found some interesting things. First, as Cortney wrote earlier today, a candidate’s stance on gun rights is an important issue to almost one-in-four voters. Yet, 55 percent are in favor of stricter gun laws, which are primarily being driven by more Democrats and Independents leaning towards curtailing Second Amendment rights. At the same time, the polling company noted that this issue fluctuates between support for more and less gun control:

In 2007, the year of the Virginia Tech massacre, the percentage of Americans who favored stricter laws on gun sales dropped to a bare majority (51%) for the first time in several years. Since then, support for stricter laws had stayed under 50%, except in the wake of the Sandy Hook school shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012. At that point, 58% of Americans said they were in favor of stricter laws on gun sales. Although support for stricter laws receded after those shootings, in which a young man fatally shot 20 children and six adults, it has yet to return to the 44% level it was at before that tragedy.

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