Public opinion on gun control in the United States has been tracked by numerous public opinion organizations and newspapers for more than 20 years.
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1990s
In the 1990s, public support for gun control led then-president Bill Clinton to sign into law the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban, which remained in force for ten years thereafter before expiring. A 1995 poll found that 58% of Americans were worried the government would not do enough to regulate guns, while only 35% of Americans reported worrying the government would regulate them too much.
2012
A Pew Research Center poll conducted shortly after the 2012 Aurora shooting found that 47% of Americans thought controlling gun ownership was more important than protecting the rights of Americans to own guns, while 46% thought the opposite.
Six days after the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting in 2012, another Pew Research Center poll found that 49% of Americans believed that controlling gun ownership was more important than protecting gun rights, while 42% of Americans believed the opposite. This marked the first time more Americans supported gun control more than gun rights since President Barack Obama took office in 2009.
2015
A poll conducted by CBS News and New York Times in October 2015 found that 92% of Americans (and 87% of Republicans) supported universal background checks for all gun sales.
2016
After the Orlando nightclub shooting in June 2016, NBC News and the Wall Street Journal released the results of a poll which found that 50% of Americans were more concerned the government would go too far in regulating guns, while 47% of Americans were more concerned that the government would not do enough to regulate guns. A CBS News poll conducted the same month found that 57% of Americans supported a federal assault weapons ban, 13 percentage points higher than a previous poll they conducted in December 2015 (after the San Bernardino shooting. Also in June 2016, a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll found that about 90% of Americans supported universal background checks.
Predictors
A 2007 study found that an index of individualism and collectivism predicted both gun ownership and attitudes toward gun control in the United States.