Monday, September 23, 2013

Gun Control Polls Find Support Sliding For Harsher Laws

Support for stricter gun laws has dropped since reaching a peak just after the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., according to two polls conducted immediately following this week's Navy Yard shooting in Washington, D.C. However, both surveys found that support for stricter laws remains higher than it was before the Newtown shooting.

In a new HuffPost/YouGov poll, 48 percent of Americans said they think gun laws should be made more strict, while 16 percent said they should be made less strict and 29 percent said they preferred no change. Support for stricter gun laws in the poll is down from a high of 60 percent in a YouGov/Economist poll conducted in January, weeks after the Newtown shooting. And when it comes to ways to reduce the likelihood of future violence, many people didn't look to gun laws. By a 57 percent to 29 percent margin, the HuffPost/YouGov poll found that most people think better mental health care is more likely to prevent future mass shootings than stricter gun laws. Similarly, the Gallup poll found that 48 percent of Americans place a "great deal" of blame for mass shootings on the "failure of the mental health system to identify individuals who are a danger to others," compared to 40 percent who said the same of "easy access to guns."

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