[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by FlamesAddiction

Yeah, it's culturally ingrained.

There was a time when the America's were being settled, that firearms were a logical necessity. Especially in the West where it wasn't unheard of for someone to purchase land and then they had to protect it from other settlers. Now it's a vestigial trait with some really unwanted results.

You see similar things in other cultures, but the results aren't usually this deadly.

This is actually more to do with America's divide between socio-economic classes and races.

In 1959, more than 50% of American households owned a gun (today it's somewhere around 35-45%) and 60% of Americans favoured an outright ban on civilian ownership of handguns.

The 1960s civil rights movement scared the bejesus of a certain segment of America's population. Even though less American households have a gun than they did 50 years ago, the amount of guns per household that has them has increased dramatically.

We're obviously not talking about black market guns here but the legal and quais-legal firearm ownership.

Support for the president crossed party lines, with Democrats (85%), independents (65%) and Republicans (51%) in favor of the measures. Some 57% of gun owners are also in favor.

While support is strong, skepticism about the effectiveness of the president’s executive actions is high—nearly 6 in 10 said the measures will not effectively curb gun-related deaths. This is especially true among gun owners, 75% of which say they didn’t think the changes would be effective.

Obama’s approval rating on his handling of gun policy went up following the announcement on Tuesday. He is up 8 points since a late-December CNN/ORC poll, with 43% approval on the issue.

http://time.com/4173116/gun-control-barack-obama-polls/

The president’s executive actions on gun control target policy elements – background checks and mental health access – that have received broad public backing. Gun control more generally, though, has seen declining support recently.

In a Pew Research poll in July, 85 percent of Americans favored background checks on all private gun sales and gun show sales – a step further than the president is set to propose. We had a very similar result in an ABC News/Washington Post poll in April 2013, with 86 percent support for background checks on gun sales at shows or online.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/views...ry?id=36096424

Under current law, background checks are required in sales by federally licensed gun dealers, but the checks are not required for gun sales by private sellers.

National polls conducted in 2015 consistently show that around 90 percent of Americans support some sort of expanded background checks for gun purchases. Here are a few examples:

Quinnipiac University poll, conducted Dec. 16-20: "Would you support or oppose a law requiring background checks on people buying guns at gun shows or online?" Support: 89 percent. Oppose: 9 percent. Unsure/No answer: 1 percent.

CBS/New York Times poll, conducted Oct. 21-25: "Do you favor or oppose a federal law requiring background checks on all potential gun buyers?" Favor: 92 percent. Oppose: 7 percent. Unsure/No answer: 1 percent.

Gallup poll, conducted Oct. 7-11: "Would you favor or oppose a law which would require universal background checks for all gun purchases in the U.S. using a centralized database across all 50 states?" Favor: 86 percent. Oppose: 12 percent. Unsure: 2 percent.

Quinnipiac University poll, conducted Sept. 17-21: "Do you support or oppose requiring background checks for all gun buyers?" Support: 93 percent. Oppose: 6 percent. Unsure/No answer: 1 percent.

Pew Research Center poll, conducted July 14-20: Do you favor or oppose "making private gun sales and sales at gun shows subject to background checks"? Favor: 85 percent. Oppose: 13 percent. Unsure/Refused: 2 percent.

Pew found that support for background checks spans all partisan and demographic groups, and it is also favored by a majority of households that own guns and those that do not.

http://www.politifact.com/punditfact...un-background/

Sixty-three percent of Americans overall said they would like to see the next president push for stricter gun laws.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-us...0UQ2O220160113

When President Obama announces today — a little over a month after 14 people died in a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California — that he is bypassing Congress with executive actions to tighten access to guns, he will lead with a measure that strengthens an astonishingly, consistently, overwhelmingly popular government policy: background checks for would-be gun buyers.

In dozens of polls over the past two decades, Americans have been asked if they support expanding background checks for the purchase of firearms. Background checks are run to prevent sales to people who have been convicted of certain crimes, who are running from the law or who otherwise have been banned from buying guns for a variety of other reasons. The specifics of the question have varied — sometimes asking about the Brady Bill, the 1993 law that required background checks for purchases from licensed dealers; sometimes about circumstances for which federal law doesn’t currently require checks, such as sales from unlicensed sellers or of ammunition. Consistently, at least 70 percent of Americans said they favor background checks. Often, far more do. In October, a CBS News/New York Times poll found that 92 percent of Americans — including 87 percent of Republicans — favor background checks for all gun buyers.1

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/...ground-checks/

While support for gun rights surpassed that of gun control in December of last year, reaching a two-decade high, it has since fallen five percentage points. Now 50% say it is more important to control gun ownership, just slightly more than the 47% who say it is more important to protect the right of Americans to own guns.

http://www.pewresearch.org/data-tren...s/gun-control/