Majority of Americans want some gun laws to be more strict, according to recent polls

(Metro Nashville Police)

Editor's note: This post contains graphic descriptions of violence.

The Metro Nashville Police Department released body-camera footage of at least two police officers who responded to Monday's shooting at Covenant School.

The footage is from the body-worn cameras of officers Rex Engelbert and Michael Collazo, who police said fatally shot the attacker on Monday at 10:27 a.m. local time.

At the start of the six-minute video, Engelbert is seen arriving at the school and exiting his vehicle. He grabs a long rifle from the car's trunk and heads toward one part of the building before heading toward a door. The officer approaches a woman outside the school who says the school is on lockdown but there are two children unaccounted for. 

The woman, a school official, directs Engelbert to go upstairs.

Another school official is seen handing the officer a key to open an exterior door into the building. Engelbert yells to his fellow officers: "Let's go, I need three!" 

Engelbert enters the school — about one minute after pulling up to the building — with other officers following and immediately getting into a tactical formation. About three minutes into the video, gunshots are heard in the distance and an officer is heard saying "It's upstairs, sounds like it’s upstairs."

The officers rush up a stairwell as the gunshots grow louder. 

The flashes from the shooter's gunfire are seen in Collazo's bodycam footage, which leads the officers down a hall to the suspect's position.

The officers approach the sound of gunfire and Engelbert rounds a corner and fires multiple times at a person near a large window, who drops to the ground, the video shows.

Collazo then pushes forward and appears to shoot the person on the ground four times with a handgun, yelling, “Stop moving!” The officers finally approach the person, move a gun away and then radio, “Suspect down! Suspect down!

A majority of both young adults and the American public at large support the idea of stricter gun laws, polling finds.

In a new Harvard Youth Poll released Tuesday and completed before the shooting at a Nashville elementary school Monday, 63% of 18-to-29-year-olds say that gun laws should be stricter, with 22% saying they should be kept as they are and 13% that they should be made less strict.

That’s similar to a 2018 poll by the Institute of Politics (IOP) at the Harvard Kennedy School taken in the wake of the Parkland shooting when 64% of young Americans thought gun laws should be made more strict. 

Young Americans’ views are generally similar to those of the public as a whole. In a Gallup survey from October 2022, a 57% majority of all Americans said that laws covering the sale of firearms should be made more strict, with 32% saying laws should be kept as they were and 10% that laws should be made less strict. 

Gallup’s polling has consistently found a majority in support of stricter gun laws since 2015. But the 57% who supported stricter gun laws in the latest poll marks a downtick from the 66% who supported stricter gun laws following the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas late last May. Support for new gun restrictions often spikes in the immediate wake of high-profile mass shootings, before leveling off later. 

Other polls taken after the Uvalde shooting also found significant support for several new gun regulations.

Here's what a CBS News poll found last summer:

An August 2022 AP-NORC poll similarly found that 85% favored a federal law requiring background checks on all potential gun buyers, including private sales and gun shows, while 59% favored a nationwide ban on the sale of AR-15 rifles and similar semiautomatic weapons.

Family members pray during a vigil at Woodmont Christian Church for victims of a mass shooting at Covenant School on Monday March 27, in Nashville, Tennessee. (Mark Zaleski/The Tennessean/AP)

Sissy Goff, the director of child and adolescent counseling at Daystar Counseling Ministries, was at the reunification site in Nashville Monday, where she told CNN she faced parents wondering about how to talk to their kids about the deadly shooting at the Covenant School.

Three 9-year-old children and three adults were killed in the Monday rampage.

It's key that parents let their children lead the conversation, Goff said, allowing them to ask questions and providing age appropriate answers.

"Kids have this amazing innate ability that they ask for the information that they're ready for," Goff said, adding parents could use "really short factual statements."

"Say two to three sentences and let them ask the next question," she said. "And then answer that age appropriately — honestly — and let them ask again."

"Be the source," she added, "where you're the one telling them, not someone else."