Only a handful of days have passed since the elementary school shooting in Connecticut that killed 26 people, many of them children, the call for stronger gun control laws appears to be gaining ground among more Americans in many of the recent polls.
According to a recent CNN/ORC poll taken this week, roughly 86 percent of those polled in the survey believe that there should be restrictions on owning guns.
Roughly 71 percent of those polled said there should be some restrictions on owning guns while 15 percent voted that all guns should be illegal for all except police and authorized personnel.
While those numbers remained relatively unchanged from previous polls taken in August, one number that has noticeably increased is the number of people calling for a ban on making, selling and owning semiautomatic weapons such as AK-47s. That number jumped five percent from 57 percent favoring a ban on such weapons in August to 62 percent for December's poll, while the number of people opposing the barring of assault weapons dropped from 42 percent in August to 37 percent in the latest poll.
Those poll figures were released days after Adam Lanza, a 20-year-old with alleged mental health problems, shot and killed his mother, Nancy, on the morning of Dec.14 before storming the Sandy Hook Elementary School that same day on a killing spree using a Sig Sauer .223 semiautomatic weapon and other such firearms that his mother, a gun enthusiast, owned. Lanza shot himself to death inside the school afterwards.
In another poll from CBS News released after the shooting, data taken by the news agency showed that gun control support was at a 10-year high, with 57 percent of those polled calling for stricter gun control laws, with only nine percent opposed and saying such regulations should be less strict.
That reflects an 18 percent increase from a similar poll taken in April, when only 39 percent voted for tighter gun regulations, and is the highest since 56 percent favored more stringent gun laws in October 2002.
However, CBS notes that while 47 percent of Americans called for tougher gun control laws after former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot in Arizona in 2011, that number dropped to 39 percent in April of this year.
In addition, of the 36 percent Democrats who comprised the poll, 78 percent of them favored tougher gun restriction. Meanwhile, of the 24 percent of Republicans who answered the poll, only 38 percent called for stronger gun control restrictions.
It's entirely possible that the recent spike in favor of gun control in polls is a reactionary response to the shooting. However, the possibility lies that the polls could mark a shift in the attitude towards gun control in a year where the Connecticut shooting was just one of several mass shootings that took place at a movie theater in July in Aurora, Colo., a mall earlier this month in Clackamas, Oreg.
Gun control support has dwindled in the last few years, according to the last Gallup poll on the subject in October 2011, when a record low of only 26 percent of Americans favored legally banning handguns by anyone except police or other authorized people. The number of people opposing gun control had steadily grown since 1975, according to Gallup's figures.
A recent ABC News/Washington Post survey also indicated a shift towards tighter gun control laws, with the percentage of those polled favoring new limits on gun rights, 54 percent to 43 percent, while 52 percent support banning semiautomatic handguns compared to the 44 percent against a ban. And on banning ammunition clips that hold 10 or more bullets, more Americans polled favored a ban, 59 percent to 38 percent.
And in a Huffington Post/YouGov survey conducted on Dec. 14 and 15, barely a day after the Connecticut shooting, 50 percent of those polled called for stricter gun control laws, while 29 percent did not want any change in gun laws and only 14 percent of those polls wanted less strict gun laws.
Regarding a possible ban on semiautomatic weapons, 51 percent of Americans favored a ban on semi-automatic weapons while only 33 percent opposed a weapons ban and 16 percent were undecided.
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