Gun control is an issue that weighs more heavily on today's young voters than on the American public at large, and the reason is easy to understand: for their entire lives, mass shootings have been a recurring part of American life.

Directly experiencing a mass shooting remains rare, yet some young people have now survived two before reaching the age of 25. When a gunman opened fire at Brown University in December 2025, at least two students on campus had already lived through a school shooting before they to college. The same thing happened in April 2025, when students who survived the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, found themselves caught in another shooting — this time at Florida State University. As one of them put it: "This is America."

Researchers have come to call today's young adults the "massacre generation." They are the first group to grow up entirely in the post-9/11, post-Columbine High School shooting era — named for the 1999 attack on the Colorado high school — one defined by routine lockdown drills, heightened security in schools and nonstop media coverage of mass violence.

Criminologists who study the effects of victimization and gun violence among young people wanted to know how growing up under the constant threat of mass shootings has shaped this cohort's views on gun legislation. In a recent study, they surveyed nearly 1,700 young adults between the ages of 18 and 29 across the United States. Their central finding: fear of mass shootings pulls this generation apart along political and gender lines, pushing some toward support for stricter gun laws and others in the opposite direction.

A debate that repeats after every shooting

Mass shootings account for only about 1% of gun deaths in the United States. Still, they profoundly shape how safe millions of Americans feel. In a 2019 survey by the American Psychological Association, nearly 80% of Americans said the possibility of a mass shooting stressed them out, and about one-third said they avoided certain places because of it. The fear has become so widespread that clinicians now have screening tools to assess and treat people with anxiety over mass violence.

Young adults have also grown up watching the same heated gun debate replay after every tragedy. Gun control advocates call for stricter firearm restrictions to prevent the next mass shooting, while gun rights advocates push back with the "good guy with a gun" argument — a phrase made popular by the National Rifle Association. Supporters of that view say more armed citizens are needed to stop active shooters, and that more people should therefore be able to buy and carry guns with fewer restrictions, such as carrying in public without a permit or on college campuses.

Researchers have long known that more guns do not necessarily mean less violence. A 2021 study found that mass shootings were more common in states with higher rates of gun ownership, and that gun homicides were more common in states with looser concealed carry laws. Yet even after decades of mass shootings, federal gun policy has barely budged. Even where individual states and local governments have passed assault weapons bans — including Connecticut and Cook County, Illinois — they have faced Second Amendment challenges that are now before the Supreme Court, whose eventual rulings will help determine whether those bans remain in force.

Young people have become some of the loudest voices in this debate, most notably through March for Our Lives — an organization started by Parkland survivors that focuses on ending gun violence — and other youth-led groups across the country. Because pro-gun views tend to be more common among older Americans, many political observers assume stricter gun laws will follow as young people gain voting power.

This fall, in the 2026 elections, voters will choose members of Congress and state lawmakers who can shape gun laws, and in a few states they will weigh in on gun policy directly. In Massachusetts, voters will decide whether to keep or repeal a 2024 law) that, among other things, requires gun owners to register their firearms with the state, expands safety training for people applying for a gun license and broadens the state's ban on assault-style weapons. In Arkansas, they will decide whether to change the state constitution) to more strongly protect gun rights, including the right to own ammunition and gun parts. If young adults turn out in record numbers, their views could help determine outcomes like these.

Young adults are split

So where do young adults stand? The research shows that a shared fear of mass shootings does not necessarily lead to shared views on guns. The survey asked young adults to rate, on a scale from 1 to 3 — from "not at all" to "a lot" — how much they fear that they or someone they love will become a victim of a mass shooting. More than 60% reported moderate or high levels of fear, including about 17% who fell in the high-fear range.

In general, about two-thirds of young adults said people should need a permit to carry a gun in public and that guns should not be allowed on college campuses. About 6 in 10 disagreed that owning more guns makes people safer, and a similar share disagreed that gun control laws are unconstitutional.

The study found that young adults who worried more about mass shootings tended to be more supportive of gun control. But this pattern did not hold for young men, Republicans or those who were politically conservative. For these groups, the opposite was true: the more they feared mass shootings, the less they supported gun restrictions. Young adults are divided on gun control, and those divisions are sharpest when fear runs high. That reversed pattern complicates the assumption, common among political observers, that a growing youth vote will translate automatically into stricter gun laws.

In the coming years, the massacre generation is on track to become part of the largest voting bloc in the country. Most young adults share a fear of mass shootings, but they disagree on what to do about them — and with each new mass shooting, that divide may only deepen.

Jillian Turanovic is Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the CU Center on Crime and Justice at the University of Colorado Boulder. Kristin Lloyd is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Clemson University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.