Staff Report –

As Congress moves closer than it has in years to passing gun safety legislation following the recent mass shootings in Texas and New York, a new Morning Consult/Politico poll shows voter support for gun control has reached a new high.

According to the June 10-12 survey, 68 percent of voters support stricter gun control laws, higher than the previous record of 66 percent, which was set after the 2019 mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio.

Support for stricter gun control among all voters is up 8 percentage points since immediately after the May 14 shooting in Buffalo, N.Y., which was followed by the May 24 shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Opposition to stricter gun control dropped from 32 percent to 27 percent.

Record-high shares of Democrats (90%) and independents (67%) back stronger gun restrictions, compared with 44 percent of Republicans, 5 points shy of a record set after the Las Vegas mass shooting in October 2017. Half of Republican voters (51%) oppose tougher gun laws, and 34 percent say they “strongly” hold this view.

The durability of support for stricter gun control measures in the weeks since the Uvalde shooting comes as Congress continues to press ahead with legislation on gun and school safety.

The House has passed a package of bills directly related to guns that is a nonstarter in the evenly divided Senate, where a bipartisan group of lawmakers — including 10 Republicans, enough to potentially overcome a filibuster — is drafting a narrower legislative response that Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) likened to a “few single important steps” on a “thousand-mile journey.”

The lead Democratic negotiator on the legislation, Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, is pushing for passage before the July 4 congressional recess, and legislative text may be released later this week.

The latest survey, along with previous research that found a majority of voters support a range of gun restrictions, suggests there is political will among voters for Congress to go further despite the posture of most Republican lawmakers.

For example, 80 percent of voters, including 73 percent of Republicans, support requiring purchasers of assault-style weapons to be at least 21 years of age.

Meanwhile, Senate negotiators announced on Sunday that they had struck a bipartisan deal on a narrow set of gun safety measures with sufficient support to move through the evenly divided chamber, a significant step toward ending a yearslong congressional impasse on the issue, according to reporting from The New York Times.

The agreement, put forth by 10 Republicans and 10 Democrats and endorsed by President Biden and top Democrats, includes enhanced background checks to give authorities time to check the juvenile and mental health records of any prospective gun buyer under the age of 21 and a provision that would, for the first time, extend to dating partners a prohibition on domestic abusers having guns.

It would also provide funding for states to enact so-called red-flag laws that allow authorities to temporarily confiscate guns from people deemed to be dangerous, as well as money for mental health resources and to bolster safety and mental health services at schools.

“The outline has yet to be finalized and still faces a perilous path in Congress, given the deep partisan divide on gun measures and the political stakes of the issue,” the Times reports. “It falls far short of the sprawling reforms that Mr. Biden, gun control activists and a majority of Democrats have long championed, such as a ban on assault weapons and universal background checks.”

And it is nowhere near as sweeping as a package of gun measures passed almost along party lines in the House last week, which would bar the sale of semiautomatic weapons to people under the age of 21, ban the sale of large-capacity magazines and enact a federal red-flag law, among other steps.

“But it amounts to notable progress to begin bridging the considerable gulf between the two political parties on how to address gun violence, which has resulted in a string of failed legislative efforts on Capitol Hill, where Republican opposition has thwarted action for years.”

The latest Morning Consult/Politico survey was conducted June 10-12, 2022, among a representative sample of 2,005 registered U.S. voters, with an unweighted margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.