Declining Public Support For Bans On Handguns

Nelson Lund, George Mason School of Law, has published Public Opinion and the Second Amendment at 5 Journal of Law 87 (2015). Here is the abstract.

Gallup polling data going back to 1959 shows a dramatic decline in public support for bans on handguns. This short comment suggests that we may have witnessed an important cultural shift that was driven in part by public policy experiments at the state level. The shift is likely to endure because those experiments proved successful and because of subsequent developments in constitutional law that are consistent with changed public attitudes.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link. The essay is also available in volume 4 of the Journal of Legal Metrics (2015).