A crazed gunman killed nine people at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, last week. In search of answers, many Americans turned to Google for information. Surprise, surprise, many of them wanted to know about gun control.
Google has released data on how Search users reacted to the violence on June 17. Its newly revamped Trends tool provides a summary of the words people entered into the search engine. One of the most interesting things the data show is that searches for “gun control” surpassed those for “gun shop” across the United States.
Searches for “gun shop” are usually more popular than “gun control,” according to data Google Trends averaged from the past year. But in the 72 hours following the Charleston shooting, “gun control” was the more popular search term in 45 states. This is hardly surprising.
Here’s what that breakdown looks like:
And here’s what search data for these two terms looked like over the course of last year:
Google Search data does not reflect shifting attitudes toward gun ownership, and particularly data just 72 hours after a shooting as compared to data averaged over several years. Also, a HuffPost-YouGov pollconducted shortly after the mass shooting in Charleston: THAT study showed that 49 percent of Americans believe now is the right time to discuss stricter gun control measures, as opposed to 37 percent who think it’s the wrong time (though again, polls taken just after specific events tend to have respondents biased towards one answer over the other because of political correctness and the immediate emotional impact as opposed to a long-term shift in ingrained beliefs and thought-patterns).
An earlier, and more telling, Pew report from December 2014 found that more people felt that protecting the rights of gun owners was more important than gun control, with 52 percent of respondents preferring the former.
President Barack Obama on June 19 addressed the Charleston tragedy and spoke about the country’s need for better gun laws, saying, “It is not good enough simply to show sympathy. You don’t see murder on this kind of scale with this kind of frequency in any other advanced nation on Earth.”
This article has been updated with additional information about an earlier Pew survey.
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source: huffington post
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You actually have that backwards. Gun owners are paranoid that people are talking about more gun control, so they are Googling it. The trend does NOT show that people are SUPPORTING gun control, just Googling it.
I’m a staunch supporter of gun rights and I Google “gun control” every couple of days to make sure my rights are still protected and that they’re aren’t some crazy new gun control suggestions popping up and getting traction.