Sixty-seven percent of Americans surveyed want stricter gun laws, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Tuesday.
Tim Malloy, the assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, said that number is the highest it’s ever been.
“We polled several issues looking at everything that has to do with weapons and clearly, it’s a reaction to what happened down in Florida,” Malloy said. “It struck a nerve and we see numbers that reflect that.”
The poll was conducted after 17 people were killed last week at a high school shooting in Parkland, Florida. The QU team ran a similar poll after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012. Tim Malloy said that in response to the emotion of that event, the numbers were high, but not as high as this poll.
Over the past two years, Malloy said that there’s been a 20 percent rise in Americans who say they support stricter gun laws.
The survey included 1,249 Americans. The poll was conducted over four days with 150 staff members calling randomly-generated numbers from all 50 states. In addition to the figure on gun laws, 67 percent supported a nationwide ban on the sale of assault weapons.
Also on Tuesday, President Donald Trump said his administration would take steps to ban bump stocks -- modifications to semi-automatic weapons that can allow them to shoot many more bullets per round.
