(Trends Wide) — In the wake of the 2018 school mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, a new generation of teen activists emerged who insisted that the old boom / bust cycle of gun control policy in this country was no more.
Gone would be the short attention span of the public on the need for more restrictions on the sale and ownership of weapons. And in its place would be a sustained campaign to keep gun issues, and the mass shootings committed with them, at the center of the public mind.
Almost four years after Parkland, however, a familiar cycle has taken hold.
Only 52% of Americans surveyed now say that the “laws covering the sale of firearms” should be stricter than they currently are, the lowest number Gallup has measured on the issue since 2014.
That marks a notable erosion on the question from just three years ago, when the country was still reeling from the 17 people killed in Parkland. At the time, two-thirds of those surveyed were in favor of stricter gun laws.
In 2019, there were still 64% of people who told Gallup they wanted stricter gun laws. That dropped to 57% in 2020 and now to 52% in 2021.
As Gallup noted in its statement: “American support for stricter gun laws has generally risen after high-profile mass shootings and has waned during periods without such events. Changes in the party that occupies the White House can also influence preferences for gun laws. In general, people favor stricter laws when Republicans are in office and less stringent laws when Democrats are in office.“.
“Something with Parkland has been different,” Melissa Strassner, a survivor of the 1999 Columbine school shooting, told The New York Times in 2019. “They have really inspired a nation.”
There is no doubt that there is some truth to that feeling. Not only did support for tougher gun laws stay higher for more than a year after the Parkland shooting, but state legislatures took unprecedented steps to limit guns.
As Pew noted in 2018: “This was an unprecedented year of success for the gun control movement in America. States across the country, including 14 with Republican governors, enacted 50 new laws restricting access to guns, ranging from prohibition of actions to allow the authorities to temporarily disarm potentially violent people “.
But, at the federal level at least, the legislative push has been harder to harness.
To mark the third anniversary of the Parkland shooting last February, President Joe Biden called on Congress to act.
“I call on Congress to enact common sense reforms to the gun law, including requiring background checks on all gun sales, a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and the elimination of immunity for gun manufacturers who knowingly place weapons of war on our streets, “Biden said. “We owe it to all of us who have lost and to all who were left behind to make a change. The time to act is now.”
While the Democratic-led House passed two measures to strengthen background checks, the Senate is not expected to act on either of them.
Meanwhile, Americans are buying more guns than ever. In 2020, almost 23 million guns were purchased, a record. That increase has continued through 2021.
And there hasn’t been a truce on mass shootings, either. According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 638 mass shootings so far in 2021. (The site defines a mass shooting as one with 4 or more victims, injured or killed, not including the gunman.)
So what happened? It seems that after a prolonged period in which the public supported stricter gun laws, the old political rules of the gun debate have been reasserted.
A new Quinnipiac poll, also released this week, finds that registered voters are split between 47% and 48% between supporting tougher gun laws and opposing them. That’s also the lowest support for tougher gun laws among voters since late 2015 in the Quinnipiac poll. In February 2018, it peaked at 66% in its survey. A Pew Research survey conducted in April this year found a generally similar pattern.
What Parkland did was keep the issue in the news, and in people’s minds, for longer. But these latest Gallup numbers suggest that the problem has now started to recede again.