Poll shows Americans blame Congress for not preventing Florida shooting

A sizable number of Americans believed Congress wasn’t doing enough to prevent school shootings and that better gun laws could have deterred the recent Florida murders, according to a poll Tuesday.

An ABC News-Washington Post poll showed that 77 percent said Congress wasn’t trying sufficiently to ward off killings such as the attack at Marjory Stoneham Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida last week. And 62 percent said neither was President Donald Trump.

Fifty-eight percent said stricter gun laws could have averted the shooting, in which 17 died and over a dozen were wounded.

The White House said the president supported some shoring up of federal background checks on gun buys.

A majority of the 808 respondents said better mental health screenings could have warded off the shooting, the eighth school shooting of the year.

The accused gunman, Nikolas Cruz, 19, has a history of unstable behavior.

But the poll also reflected the country’s divide on a solution. While 50 percent supported a ban on assault weapons, such as the one authorities said Cruz allegedly used, 46 percent were against that.

Those numbers were close to survey results from June 2016, after 49 clubgoers were shot to death in Orlando, Florida, ABC News said.

The political party breakdown showed 80 percent of the Republican respondents blamed mental health screening failures, 62 percent of independents agreed and only 33 percent of Democrats agreed.

Langer Research Associates of New York conducted the phone poll Feb. 15-18; the shooting was Feb. 14.

The margin of error was 4.0 points.

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