Researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health conducted the survey Jan. 2-14, 2013 “to understand public attitudes about a range of violence prevention proposals.” The authors wrote that it had been almost 15 years since a poll gauged public sentiment on a wide range of potential policies for reducing gun violence.
"I was surprised, frankly, how high levels of support were," said Colleen Barry, a co-author of the report who teaches a course on public opinion polling and health policy at Johns Hopkins. "I think the takeaway for policymakers is that they have quite a diverse set of policies from which to choose."
The online survey queried a sample of 2,703 respondents with an overall margin of error under 2 percent and a 69 percent completion rate. About 35 percent of the respondents were gun owners and a subset of those (6 percent of all respondents) were NRA members. The researchers oversampled gun owners and non-gun owners who live in households with a gun because they wanted to make precise estimates about the differences between those groups and non-gun owners in general. For estimates on respondents' support of different policies, however, they weighted the responses to fit a national sample.
A majority of respondents supported all but four of 31 suggested gun-control policies. Proposals with the strongest popularity included universal background checks and a variety of prohibitions on potentially dangerous people. Bans on military-style semiautomatic firearms and high-capacity magazines were far less popular among gun owners and NRA members than among non-gun owners.
When asked about “requiring a background check system for all gun sales to make sure a purchaser is not legally prohibited from having a gun,” most gun owners (84.3 percent) and most NRA members (73.7 percent) said they supported it. The requirement was even more popular among non-gun owners -- 89.9 percent.
Many states do not report mental health records to a background-check system, yet 85.4 percent of overall respondents said they favored requiring such reporting if “a person is prohibited from buying a gun either because of involuntary commitment to a hospital for psychiatric treatment or because of being declared mentally incompetent by a court of law.”
In general, suggested bans garnered more support among non-gun owners than gun owners. For example, “banning the sale of military-style, semiautomatic assault weapons that are capable of shooting more than 10 rounds of ammunition without reloading” won approval from 77.4 percent of non-gun owners but only 45.7 percent of gun owners.
Several hypothetical bans on ammunition clips capable of carrying 10 or more rounds received similar responses, illustrating a clear divide among non-gun owners and gun owners on restricting access to high-powered weapons or their ammunition.
Respondents -- regardless of gun ownership -- were largely aligned on types of people that should be prohibited from having a gun: those who have been convicted of violating a domestic violence restraining order (80.8 percent), those who have been convicted of a serious crime as a juvenile (83.1 percent) and those who have been convicted of two or more crimes involving alcohol or drugs within a three-year period (74.8 percent).
Barry pointed out that there appeared to be agreement about punishing firearm dealers who intentionally sell to a prohibited person, such as a convicted felon. When asked about a mandatory minimum sentence of two years in prison for knowingly selling a gun to someone who cannot legally have a gun, 70.7 percent of gun owners and 77.7 percent of non-gun owners said they favored the requirement.