In many states, gun restrictions have loosened since Sandy Hook - The Boston Globe

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

57% : "Texas will always be the leader in defending the Second Amendment, which is why we built a barrier around gun rights this session," Abbott said at the time.
54% : Research by Donohue and others has found that those laws, also known as right-to-carry laws, are associated with increases in aggregate violent crime.
54% :Despite this hard-right turn in many states, there have been some high-profile advances in gun safety laws.
51% : In 2016, one year after a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California passed a suite of gun control regulations by referendum, including background checks for ammunition purchases and a ban on high-capacity magazines.
51% : During oral arguments, the court's conservative majority appeared sympathetic to the idea that such a requirement infringes on Second Amendment rights.
48% : "At the state level, there's been a real push to restore rights," said Christopher Stone, communications director for the National Association for Gun Rights, which was founded in 2000, and has pushed for pro-gun laws including permitless carry.
47% : "It just goes to show, for all of the mass shootings and despite the spike in gun violence, gun-rights advocates are just pushing hard and aggressively for loosening gun laws, and they've been remarkably successful," said Adam Winkler, a professor at UCLA School of Law who specializes in constitutional rights and gun policy.
46% : One month after the Sandy Hook shooting, former governor Andrew Cuomo of New York muscled through a gun safety package that included an expansion of the state's ban on assault weapons, a ban on high-capacity magazines, universal background checks, and more.
45% : "In the reddest states, gun laws are weaker and in the bluest states gun laws are stronger," since Sandy Hook, said Allison Anderman, senior counsel and director of local policy at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a group founded by the former congresswoman Gabby Giffords after she was shot in the head in 2011 in an assassination attempt and mass shooting.
44% : (Some states have passed gun safety bills in addition to measures that weaken gun control.)
39% : In the 10 years that passed between the slaughter of 26 children and adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School and the mass murder in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday, the lack of action on gun control became a perennial source of frustration -- and fear -- for millions of Americans.
38% : But conservative states have made it a point of pride to defy federal gun laws and make it easier to carry guns despite the drumbeat of mass shootings -- moves experts say have made those states less safe.
34% : And since 2012, five states, including Missouri, have passed "extreme nullification" laws, which discourage the enforcement of federal gun laws.
31% : Asked why his state has loosened its gun laws instead of tightening them in the wake of mass shootings, Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, a Democrat, blamed "political pandering to a small, hard-core, activist cohort for whom any common sense gun safety measures are anathema."
21% :Abbott has disputed the idea that stronger gun laws prevent mass shootings, and said his recent loosening of gun laws had nothing to do with the massacre in Uvalde.
18% : Donohue, the Stanford professor, is hopeful that Chief Justice John Roberts will not want his name associated with a relaxation in gun laws that could lead to more gun deaths, and could persuade Justice Brett Kavanaugh to join him.

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