School shooting sways US views on guns

NEW YORK—The massacre of children at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., appears to be profoundly swaying Americans’ views on guns, galvanizing the broadest support for stricter gun laws in about a decade, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll.

As President Barack Obama tries to persuade a reluctant Congress to pass new gun laws, the poll found that a majority of Americans—54 percent—think gun-control laws should be tightened, up markedly from a CBS News poll in April that found that only 39 percent backed stricter laws.

The rise in support for stricter gun laws stretched across political lines, including an 18-point increase among Republicans. A majority of independents now back stricter gun laws.

Whether the Newtown shooting, with its 20 murdered first-graders and six adults, will have a long-term effect on public opinion of gun laws is difficult to assess just a month after the rampage. But unlike the smaller increases in support for gun control immediately after other mass shootings, including the one after the 2011 shooting in Tucson, Ariz., that severely wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, the latest polling results suggest a deeper, and possibly more resonating, shift.

In terms of specific gun proposals that are being considered, the poll found even wider support—including among gun owners.

The idea of requiring background checks on all gun purchases, which would eliminate a provision that allows some 40 percent of guns to be sold by unlicensed sellers without checks, was overwhelmingly popular. Nine in 10 Americans would favor such a law, the poll found—including nine in 10 of the respondents who said that there was a gun in their household, and 85 percent whose households include members of the National Rifle Association.

A ban on high-capacity magazines, like the 15-round and 30-round magazines that have been used in several recent mass shootings, was supported by more than six in 10, and by a majority of those who live in households with guns. And just more than half of all respondents, 53 percent, said they would support a ban on some semiautomatic weapons.

In the past decade, as gun rights tended to gain ground—including victories in the Supreme Court and in successful defeats of efforts to renew bans on assault weapons—other mass shootings did evoke calls for stricter gun measures.

Days after a gunman killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007, a poll by The Associated Press found that 47 percent of Americans favored stricter gun laws. And after the 2011 shooting in Tucson killed six people and seriously wounded Giffords, a CBS poll found that 47 percent favored stricter gun laws.

But a little more than a year later, support dropped back until being catapulted by the Newtown shootings.

“I’m from a rural area in the South, I grew up in a gun culture, my father hunted,” Leslie Hodges, a 64-year-old graphic artist who lives in Atlanta and has a gun, said in a follow-up interview. “However, I don’t believe being able to have a gun keeps you from thinking reasonably about changes that would keep someone from walking into a school and being able to kill 20 children in 20 seconds. I think that we can say, OK, we want the freedom to have guns in this country, but there are rules we can all agree to that will make us all safer.”

The poll also gave an indication of the state of play in Washington at the outset of what is expected to be a fierce debate over the nation’s gun laws, as the NRA and several members of Congress, particularly Republicans in the House, have criticized the gun-control measures that Obama proposed on Wednesday and have vowed to block them.

Americans said that they trusted the president over Republicans in Congress to make the right decisions about gun laws by a margin of 47 percent to 39 percent, the poll found.