So where do young adults stand? We’ve found that a shared fear of mass shootings does not necessarily lead to shared views on guns. Our survey asked young adults to rate on a scale from 1 to 3 – from “not at all” to “a lot” – how much they fear that they or someone they love will become a victim of a mass shooting. More than 60% reported moderate or high levels of fear, including about 17% who fell in the high-fear range.
In general, about two-thirds of young adults said people should need a permit to carry a gun in public and that guns shouldn’t be allowed on college campuses. About 6 in 10 disagreed that owning more guns makes people safer, and a similar share disagreed that gun control laws are unconstitutional.
We found that young adults who worried more about mass shootings tended to be more supportive of gun control. But this pattern didn’t hold for young men, Republicans or those who were politically conservative. For these groups, the opposite was true: The more they feared mass shootings, the less they supported gun restrictions. Young adults are divided on gun control, and those divisions are sharpest when fear runs high.
In the coming years, the massacre generation is on track to become part of the largest voting bloc in the country. Most young adults share a fear of mass shootings, but they disagree on what to do about them. And with each new mass shooting, that divide may only deepen.
— and in Young voters fear mass shootings like the one in Oregon, but that fear divides them on gun control