Pew Research Center finds 75% of Trump supporters favor checks on private gun sales and sales at gun shows, and 82% support barring those on terror watchlists

Even as the partisan divide on gun rights widens in the US, an overwhelming majority of both Clinton and Trump supporters say they support several of the gun control reform proposals that have failed to pass Congress over the past few years, according to a new national survey from the Pew Research Center.

Seventy-five percent of Trump supporters said they favor background checks on private gun sales and sales at gun shows, as did 90% of Clinton supporters. And 82% of Trump supporters said they also favor barring people on federal no-fly or watchlists from buying guns.

Congressional Republicans blocked both of these policies from becoming law this June, in the wake of a terror attack at an Orlando nightclub that left 49 people dead and more than 50 wounded. The attack was the deadliest mass shooting in recent American history.

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The strong support for background checks among Trump supporters mirrors the findings of earlier polls, which found that strong majorities of gun owners, Republicans and self-identified National Rifle Association members support expanded background checks.

The new survey results bolster arguments by Democrats and gun control advocates that there are some additional gun laws that most Americans do support, even as the broader debate on gun control remains polarizing, and congressional Republicans refuse to advance any gun control legislation. But the findings also highlight how Democrats’ anti-gun views are out of step with Americans’ generally favorable opinion of gun ownership.

Overall, 58% of the public believes that owning a gun does more to protect gun owners from crime than it might put them at risk, the Pew survey found. But only 32% of Clinton supporters agreed with the statement. Twice as many, 65%, said gun ownership does more to “put people’s safety at risk” than it does to protect them, the survey found.

Asked simply whether gun rights or gun control is more important to them, Americans showed a dramatic partisan split: 90% of registered voters who support Trump said protecting gun rights was more important than controlling gun ownership, and only 9% said they prioritized controlling gun ownership.



Clinton supporters said the opposite: 79% of the Democratic nominee’s supporters said that controlling gun ownership was more important, compared with 19% who said they put more value on protecting gun rights.

The 70-point partisan gap in support for gun control over gun rights has nearly doubled since the 2012 presidential election, when only 62% of Barack Obama’s supporters said they prioritized gun control, and a much larger 21% of Republican Mitt Romney’s supporters agreed.

But these dramatic partisan divides over gun rights disappeared when Americans were asked about some specific gun control policies, including whether they supported “making private gun sales and sales at gun shows subject to background checks”.

In all, 83% of respondents said they supported this policy. There was also close bipartisan agreement in support of “laws to prevent people with mental illness from purchasing guns” and “barring gun purchases by people on the federal no-fly or watch lists”.

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Other gun control policies showed the same clear partisan divide as the questions about prioritizing gun rights, including bans on assault-style weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips. Military-style semi-automatic rifles are rarely used in overall American gun murders, but they have been used in several high-profile mass shootings.

Overall, only about half of respondents supported these bans. But 74% of Clinton supporters favored a ban on assault-style weapons, which the candidate has endorsed, compared to 34% of Trump supporters.

The survey also found clear demographic differences in support and opposition to bans on assault-style weapons and high-capacity magazines, with a majority of women supporting the bans and a majority of men opposing them. Respondents with a college degree were most likely to support a ban on assault-style weapons. The ban also has relatively strong support among people who said they had a gun in their household: 45% said they supported a ban, compared to 61% of people in non-gun-owning households.

The Pew survey also found that Republican support for an assault weapon ban has continued to shrink in the wake of a series of high-profile mass shootings. Last year, 44% of respondents who were Republican or leaned Republican said they supported a ban on assault-style weapons. This year, only 35% of them said they supported a ban.

The Pew report’s findings are based on a telephone survey of a national sample of 2,010 adults conducted in early August.

Gun control has become a fiercely contested campaign issue between Clinton, who labeled the NRA one of her top enemies, and Trump, who was endorsed early by the NRA, which continues to champion him. The next president will likely determine the partisan balance of the supreme court, a decision that could affect how the court interprets the limitations of Americans’ constitutional right to own and carry guns. Clinton’s campaign has said she thinks a crucial 2008 supreme court decision supporting gun rights was “wrongly decided”.