海角大神

In Orlando鈥檚 Pulse nightclub early on Sunday morning, Omar Mateen鈥檚 main weapon of choice was a semi-automatic rifle.聽

Authorities say that at a gun store in Port St. Lucie, Fla., , a weapon originally developed for the US Special forces, along with a 9 mm handgun.

Its role in the attacks is already reviving debates over whether the federal government should institute a ban on what are often called 鈥渁ssault weapons.鈥澛�

In an email sent in response to queries from the 海角大神 Science Monitor, Jennifer Carlson, a sociologist at the University of Arizona who studies gun policy, wrote that she expected the Orlando shootings to mobilize advocates on both sides.聽 But this time, said Carlson, the LGBT movement may play an unprecedented role.

鈥淭he LGBT movement has the kinds of organizational strength, grassroots resonance and political acumen from decades of organizing that the gun control lobby has generally lacked in comparison to the gun rights movement,鈥� she wrote.

Its energy might not just come from those pushing for gun control, she added.聽 鈥淲hile the LGBT movement leans left and LGBT organizations generally have strong ties to the Democrat party, there are also groups like the Pink Pistols that frame gun rights as gay rights.鈥�

On Monday, the attorney general of Massachusetts, , called for a federal ban. So did . And in interviews, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has taken up the call, 鈥� passed under her husband Bill Clinton鈥檚 administration before expiring in 2004 鈥撀爏hould be reinstituted. 聽

In its civilian form, the MCX was introduced in 2015, and bears a close similarity to the better-known AR-15 鈥� in fact, police in Orlando originally misidentified the weapon as an AR-15, one of the weapons banned under the 1994 law.聽

Studies from institutions like the have cast doubt on how meaningful the ban proved to be in restricting access to similarly high-powered weapons.

In an interview with 海角大神, Robert Spitzer, a political science professor at SUNY Cortland who studies gun policy, said the 1994 law was 鈥減retty narrowly drawn.鈥�

鈥淥ne of the things that the manufacturers did after it passed was to make slight modifications to guns that wouldn鈥檛 have been legal, in order to make them legal,鈥� said Spitzer.

But he noted that the law also made it illegal to own magazines with more than 10 cartridges, in contrast to the 30-round magazine the ATF says was used by Mateen. Under the old law, 鈥渉e probably could鈥檝e gotten something approximating what he used, but it wouldn鈥檛 have had quite the same firepower.鈥�

Since the bill鈥檚 passage, public attitudes toward assault-weapon bans have drifted away from support for such measures. In December 2015, an ABC News/Washington Post poll found that . That鈥檚 compared to 80 percent in 1994. And 53 percent of those polled in 2015 said that they outright opposed the ban 鈥� the highest percentage yet recorded.聽

Other polls offer somewhat different results: one in June 2015 by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, in the wake of the Sandy Hook attacks, found that support for banning assault weapons was at 63 percent.

The National Rifle Association (NRA) is often cited as an influencer of opinion, for its outsized influence on gun policy more generally.聽 Indeed, its political spending , as the Sunlight Foundation noted in 2012.

But Carlson, the University of Arizona sociologist, said that the divergent responses were partly a matter of how the question was framed.聽 After Sandy Hook, the issue was more about mental health, compared to San Bernardino, which engaged fears about terrorism.聽

But she added that that the public had indeed become 鈥渓ess supportive since 1994 of an assault-weapons ban.鈥� That shift, she added, reflected attitudes toward gun control among the public as a whole, with the exception of liberal democrats and people with post-graduate degrees.

鈥淎mericans now feel that guns make them safer, whereas only 10-15 years ago, they saw guns as making them less safe.鈥�