Elementary school shooting: What gun control laws might US voters support? (+video)

Will the heartbreaking school shooting in Newtown, Conn., lead to more support for gun control measures in the US? That’s certainly possible. The deaths of so many innocent children, so young, are likely to earn the crime a place on a tragic roll call of recent American history. Columbine. Virginia Tech. Tucson, Ariz. Aurora, Colo. And now Newtown.

Certainly those who have long pushed for greater control on gun ownership see the awful event as yet another teaching moment to try and sway public opinion to their side.

“How young do the victims have to be and how many children need to die before we stop the proliferation of guns in our nation?” said Marion Wright Edelman, chairman of the Children’s Defense Fund, in a statement Friday afternoon.

Yet in the past such calls, however emotional, have done little to sway the American public’s general attitudes towards guns. US citizens tend to see mass shootings as resulting more from troubled individuals than from easy availability of firearms.

For instance, a Pew Research survey taken in the wake of July’s shootings in an Aurora cinema found that 67 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that mass gun killings such as that “are just the isolated acts of troubled individuals.” Twenty-four percent said they “reflect broader problems in American society.”

The Pew poll found US attitudes toward guns little changed after Aurora. Prior to the shootings, 45 percent of respondents said it was more important to control gun ownership, while 49 percent said it was more important to protect the right to own guns. After the shootings, 47 percent said gun control was more important, while 46 percent said gun rights were more important.

Other polls echo the fact that this is a question on which the US is generally split. A 2011 Gallup survey found that 44 percent of voters thought US gun laws should be tightened, while 43 percent felt they should be kept as-is.

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