‘Gun control’ Google searches trending in the US: report
Posted March 2, 2018 9:20 pm.
Last Updated March 2, 2018 9:33 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, California (NEWS 1130) – It seems last month’s school shooting in Parkland, Florida is still fresh in the minds of a lot of Americans.
Google Trends has released a new report showing searches for “gun control” have spiked, even becoming more popular than a nearby “gun shop” search for all but Kentucky and Tennessee.
In 2017 it was very much the opposite with an overwhelming majority of states searching for gun shops over control policies.
A number of searches even focused on the AR-15–the kind of rifle used in a number of mass shootings. Interest in that style of firearm jumped dramatically around the time of the Sandy Hook massacre and the Aurora movie theatre shooting in 2012.
Google also charted interest in gun control, gun rights, and the Second Amendment since 2004. Searches for gun control and the Second Amendment spiked immediately after Sandy Hook and have been on a higher-than-average trend over the last few years.
Gun control has been a popular Google search over the last week in all of the states except one small district on the Montana-North Dakota border. Meantime, searches for ‘gun rights’ are still quite popular across much of the US.
The top searched gun control questions of the last week include ‘What is gun control?’, ‘What can I do about gun control?’, ‘What did Obama do for gun control?’, ‘How many school shootings happened in 2018?’, and ‘Why we need gun control’.
The US lead gun control related searches world wide this week, followed by Canada and Australia, then a few other European countries.
After loud calls for gun control legislation to be imlemented–especially from Parkland’s surviving students–a number of retailers like Dick’s Sporting Goods and Walmart have changed their gun sale policies, which likely in turn is prompting more Americans to turn their attention to the idea of gun control.
