Recent surveys taken by NC State students about NC State students have found shifts in gun attitudes after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting.
The Pack Poll, a research group which conducts representative surveys on campus, have posted statistics in two recent articles on the topic of gun ownership and gun laws. Intriguing findings from those surveys stated that nearly 47 percent of NC State students come from a household with a gun and 67 percent are in favor of a national semi-automatic weapon ban.
“This survey was very timely after the recent Parkland shooting,” said Daniel Dulaney, a fourth-year studying statistics and economics and writer for Pack Poll. “Pack Poll in the past has done multiple surveys trying to figure out the gun attitudes of State students. We wanted to see if there had been any significant attitude shifts from what we have seen in the past.”
In the days that followed the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida on Feb. 14 that killed 17 people, Pack Poll wanted to record student opinion as soon as possible even though very few polls had been run on the subject of guns following the particular shooting.
“The gun survey was a little unexpected [and was] immediately after the Parkland shooting happened,” said Celeste Chapman, a third-year studying political science and Pack Poll writer. “We didn’t want to wait. We went through past polls from the Las Vegas shooting and shootings before to guess which questions were going to be the most pertinent. We guessed pretty much right on a few. So we knew we had a few data points to compare with other polls.”
After compiling about 13 questions on their latest survey, the poll was sent out to a sample of 3,500 undergraduate students and 3,500 graduate students and approximately 21 percent of those students responded to this study between Feb. 22 and 25.
“We asked questions about gun ownership, parent gun ownership and student ownership,” Chapman said. “We asked a few questions about gun attitudes and more specific policy-related questions. Then we asked basic demographic questions, Republican or Democrat, male or female, undergrad and grad students. … There was a huge difference there [between undergraduates and graduates].”
Upon tallying the results, there were a few elements from the survey that stood out to the researchers.
“I thought it was interesting that attitudes about specific gun control policies among people with different social ideologies were as polarized as those who identify with different political parties,” Dulaney said. “I thought it was interesting that there was such a big divide between students in different parties.”
Chapman found the gun policy change to be among the answers that stood out as it marked a shift in NC State attitudes.
“I was shocked at the level of support for certain policy proposals such as the semi-automatic weapons ban,” Chapman said. “We have polled on this in the past, and it was not near 67 percent which is in line with public opinion nationwide. That is something that has been reported on is the huge difference in response to the shootings compared with jumps in public opinion from other shootings. There is always a leap, but it has never been like this.”
Following this study, Pack Poll aims to continue finding what students think about certain topics as an overall unit in addition to following up and building upon the research they have already done.
“I would incline people to explore our website to stay alert for stuff that we are doing in the future because there is a lot of interesting topics that we cover,” Dulaney said. “It is interesting to know what your peers believe as a whole on interesting topics like gun safety and control. I would implore people to stay up to date with what we are doing and get excited about the different results we’ll come out with the next eight months.”
