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Experts Favor Either More-Permissive or More-Restrictive Gun Policies but Appear to Agree on What the Objectives of Gun Policies Should Be

• The researchers identified clusters of experts with similar views on the 15 policies we examined. This resulted in two classes of experts who were sharply differentiated not just on their assessments of the policies but also on their ratings of which advocacy or membership organizations had gun policy positions closest to their own. The authors label the two groups the permissive class and the restrictive class, for their preferred approaches to policies governing the ownership and use of firearms.
• Across 134 judgments about the effects of the policies, only 12 times did the median judgment for each class of experts disagree on the direction of the effect. More than half of these instances concerned two policies — permitless carry and elimination of gun-free zones. Four policies generated less disagreement: expanded mental health prohibitions, required reporting of lost or stolen firearms, a media campaign to prevent child access, and surrender of firearms by prohibited possessors.
• The results suggest that the differing favorability ratings are strongly associated with differing beliefs about the true effects of the policies, not differences in what the experts thought should be the objective of gun policies. Indeed, there was an overwhelming consensus between the groups that their preferred policies were those they saw as reducing firearm suicides and homicides.

This report was superseded by a revised, updated edition in late 2021.

The effects of firearm policies have rarely been the subject of rigorous scientific evaluation in comparison with most other policies with similarly consequential effects on public safety, health, and the economy. Without strong scientific evidence of the effects of laws, policymakers and the public rely heavily on the expert judgments of advocates or social scientists. This makes gun policy experts' estimates of the true effects of policies an important influence on gun policy debates and decisions.

In this report, RAND researchers describe the results of a survey in which gun policy experts estimated the likely effects of 15 gun-related policies on 12 societal outcomes. The researchers use these and other responses to establish the diversity of beliefs among gun policy experts about the true effects of gun laws, establish where experts are in more or less agreement on those effects, and evaluate whether differences in the policies favored by experts result from disagreements about the policies' true effects or disagreements in experts' policy objectives or values. The analysis suggests that experts on both sides of the gun policy debate share some objectives but disagree on which policies will achieve those objectives. Therefore, collecting more and stronger evidence about the true effects of policies is, the researchers believe, a necessary step toward building greater consensus.

• Chapter One

  Introduction

• Chapter Two

  Sample of Policy Experts

• Chapter Three

  Survey Design and Analysis Plan

• Chapter Four

  Survey Findings

• Chapter Five

  Correlates of Experts' Divergent Views

• Chapter Six

  Developing a Gun Policy Comparison Tool Using Survey Data

• Chapter Seven

  Discussion and Conclusions

• Appendix A

  RAND Survey of Firearms Experts

• Appendix B

  Details About the Statistical Modeling of Expert Favorability Ratings

• Appendix C

  Descriptive Statistics by Expert Class, Outcome, and Policy

• Appendix D

  Data Sources, Calculations, and Additional Assumptions for the Gun Policy Comparison Tool