Mental health issues, gun laws, unstable families and media coverage get most of the blame for mass shootings in the U.S. in recent years, says a new survey from the University of Texas and Texas Tribune. Voters also attributed either “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of the blame for shootings in the U.S. to the spread of extremist views on the Internet and to drug use. “When we look at the explanations for the shootings, what we see is that there is bipartisan agreement on the failure of the mental health system,” said Jim Henson of the the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, co-director of the poll. “It was the No. 1 response among most major subgroups. If I was a political leader looking for an area where we could get agreement on gun violence, this is where I would look.”
Gun control laws should be stricter, according to 41 percent of Texas voters, and less strict, according to 18 percent in the poll, which was taken before the Paris attacks. Just over a third would leave those laws alone. Poll co-director Daron Shaw says mass shootings prompt “immediate reactions that we ought to regulate guns. But when you offer a plethora of options, I think people respond to the notion that there are crazy people out here and you ought to do something about these crazy people.”