This week's shooting rampage at Virginia Tech is focusing new attention on Americans' relationship with guns.

Internationally, critics have decried America's "gun culture," and gun-control advocates are trying to seize the momentum. Supporters of gun rights have pointed to the dangers of abridging the constitutional right to bear arms.

But quietly, American attitudes toward firearms have shifted. Gun ownership is at the lowest level in three decades, and support for the regulation of firearms, which is always been high, has reached a new peak, according to one new poll. Some of the biggest supporters of gun-control are teenagers and college students.

For instance, 88 percent of high school students polled by Hamilton College in 2006 supported a five-day waiting period for a hand-gun purchase. The reason, say researchers, is their own experience with guns.

"They've seen a lot of gun violence in ways that kind of frighten them," says Dennis Gilbert, professor at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. "Something like 35 percent of high school seniors in 2006 knew someone who'd been shot at or threatened with a gun. That's more than 1 in 3, and it was a national survey, not just of urban areas."

Rising support for gun control doesn't mean that stiffer laws are right around the corner, observers say. Indeed, in the wake of the shootings at Virginia Tech, which led to 33 fatalities, most politicians on each side of the issue are avoiding it for now.

But gun advocates contend that the brutal shooting could have been stopped or at least contained if other students had been allowed to carry weapons. And, pointing to the relaxation of gun laws in a majority of states over the past decade since the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., they assert that public opinion is on their side.

But academic researchers who study public opinion have reached a very different conclusion. On April 10, for example, less than a week before the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech, the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago released a report that found that gun ownership continues to decline as support for firearms control is rising.

Gun ownership in modern America reached a peak in the mid-1970s when 55 percent of American households reported owning a gun, according to the NORC study. In 2006, that share had dropped to 35 percent. Researchers attribute the change to two things: fewer people hunt as a recreational activity and, as the crime rate dropped during the 1990s, fewer people felt the need for a gun to protect themselves.

Page: 1 | 2