According to a comprehensive survey from Pew Research Center, a majority of Americans (52 percent) would like to see stricter gun laws, while 18 percent think gun laws should be less strict than they are today.
Yet the survey found a sharp drop in overall support for gun control. When asked whether it was more important to protect gun rights or control gun ownership, 51 percent favored gun control and 47 percent supported gun rights. In 2000, two-thirds favored gun control measures.
The survey measuring attitudes toward gun ownership included 3,900 Americans, including more than 1,200 gun owners.
Nearly 30 percent of gun owners say that gun laws should be stricter in the United States, while 44 percent say the laws are fine the way they are. Conversely, 27 percent say gun laws should be less strict.
Most non-gun-owners are not firmly opposed to the idea of firearm ownership: 52 percent say they could see themselves owning a gun in the future. On the other hand, nearly 75 percent of Americans who do own guns say they can’t imagine living without them.
At least two-thirds have lived in a household with guns and about 70 percent have fired a gun.
Two-thirds of gun owners say they own a gun to protect themselves or loved ones. More than 40 percent of Americans say they know someone who has been shot intentionally or accidentally. Gun owners (51 percent) are also considerably more likely than non-gun-owners (40 percent) to know somebody who has been shot. Six percent of gun owners say they’ve been shot, compared with 2 percent of non-gun-owners.
Nearly 25 percent say someone has used a firearm to threaten or intimidate them or their family.
Only a quarter of them say gun ownership is very important to their overall identity, although most gun owners (74 percent) say gun ownership is “essential to their own sense of freedom.”
Some 89 percent supported preventing the mentally ill from buying guns and 84 percent of all adults supported background checks for private sales and at gun shows.
Only one-third of gun owners support permit-less or “Constitutional” carry laws that allow people to carry concealed firearms in public without a permit. Conversely, 82 percent of gun owners support banning gun purchases by people on terrorist-watch lists.
Barring gun purchases for people on no-fly lists won support from 83 percent, while 71 percent of adults, including a small majority of gun owners, supported a federal database tracking gun sales.
Among the 1,200 gun owners Pew surveyed, 19 percent were members of the NRA. Among gun owners, 29 percent say the NRA has too much influence, 53 percent indicated the right amount of influence, while 17 percent say it wields too little influence.
Overall, 44 percent said the NRA has too much influence with 40 percent saying the NRA’s influence is just right. Only about 15 percent would like the NRA to have more influence on gun laws.
Nine percent of gun owners have contacted a public official to express an opinion on gun policy in the past 12 months, compared with only 5 percent of non-gun-owners. Of the gun owners who believe gun laws should be less strict, 19 percent have contacted a public official to talk guns in the past year.
Nearly 40 percent of men own guns, and so do 22 percent of women. More than 33 percent of whites own guns, as do 24 percent of blacks and 15 percent of Hispanics. Nearly half of rural Americans are gun owners, but so are nearly one in five urban Americans.
The full study is here.
Photo courtesy Shot Show
