Support for increasing legislative checks on guns was particularly high among women and non-white Americans. | Getty Gallup poll: Majority of Americans now favor more gun laws

A majority of Americans support passing new gun control legislation, according to a new Gallup poll released on Thursday — marking the first time a majority of those surveyed has expressed such a view since Gallup started tracking the issue in 2000.

The poll — taken in the month between the deadly mass shootings in Las Vegas on Oct. 1 and in Sutherland Springs, Texas, on Nov. 5 — found that 51 percent of Americans were in favor of increased gun legislation.


The findings show that support has slowly risen since 2012, when 47 percent backed increased legislative action. The year prior saw one of the sharpest increases, rising 12 percentage points from 2011. The 2012 poll, in which support surged, was taken shortly after the Sandy Hook Elementary school mass shooting in which 20 children and six adults were killed.

Support for enforcing existing laws more strictly, meanwhile, has remained largely unchanged over the past five years, ticking up slightly from 46 percent in 2012 to 47 percent in 2017.

While the shootings in Nevada and Texas — which claimed the lives of 58 and 26 people respectively — reignited calls from Democratic officials for the government to beef up its restrictions on guns, legislation has stalled in the GOP-controlled Congress. A push to curtail the used of the so-called "bump stock" accessory that authorities say was used to send a deadly barrage of bullets onto a crowd of concertgoers in Las Vegas has yet to be acted on by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Support for increasing legislative checks on guns was particularly high among women and non-white Americans, 60 and 62 percent of which backed further measures. Along party lines, 81 percent of Democrats favored calls for new legislation while 73 percent of Republicans preferred to impose existing laws more strictly.

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An October Gallup poll found that over six in 10 registered voters cited gun control as one of the most important factors they considered when selecting who to vote for. The finding, at 61 percent, saw an increase from 2015, when 54 percent of voters deemed it an important campaign topic.

The Gallup poll surveyed 1,028 adults from Oct. 5-11 over telephone and has a margin of sampling error of 4 percentage points.