According to a poll published in — of all places — the Huffington Post, although support for gun control measures reached an all time high after the Parkland, Florida mass shooting, that support has slowly eroded over the past two months, and Americans are in the midst of a “grand reversion” on the issue.
Huffington Post conducted the poll with YouGov, which isn’t the nation’s most well-respected polling company, but the results seem unmistakable: while Americans expressed a brief “burst” of support for increased gun control measures immediately following the Parkland incident, that support has lessened over time.
“Once-heightened concerns about gun violence have tapered back to previous levels, as has a desire for stricter gun laws and a belief that gun restrictions can be passed without violating Second Amendment rights,” HuffPo reports.
Fewer Americans now think gun violence is a problem than even in 2017, right after the Las Vegas and Texas mass shootings — some of the worst in American history. About half of Americans now favor making gun laws stricter (down about 4 points from the days following Parkland), fewer Americans believe that it’s possible to enact more restrictive gun measures without infringing on the Second Amendment, and 10% fewer Americans see gun control as a necessary priority for Congress.
Weirdly enough, more Americans see stricter gun laws as being possible with a more functionally bipartisan legislature, but fewer see gun laws as a top priority when it comes to voting. Only 6% of Americans believe guns are the nation’s “most important problem.”
This change isn’t unexpected. Discussions about gun violence and gun control peak around mass shootings, and plenty of progressive activists take advantage of the public’s sudden interest in gun laws to push the issue further into the mainstream. But as with Sandy Hook, few changes to gun laws actually result from marketing in the wake of a mass shooting.