Effective gun policies must balance the constitutional right to bear arms and public interest in gun ownership with concerns about public health and safety. However, current efforts to craft legislation related to guns are hampered by a paucity of reliable information about the effects of such policies. To help address this problem, the RAND Corporation launched the Gun Policy in America initiative. The primary goal of the project is to create resources where policymakers and the general public can access unbiased information that facilitates development of fair and effective firearm policies.

In 2018, RAND published a report (Morral, Schell, and Tankard, 2018) that describes results from a 2016 survey of individuals with experience or expertise in evaluating gun policies; with that effort, the researchers sought to identify where access to reliable data would be most useful in resolving policy debates. Using the survey results, RAND also developed the Gun Policy Expert-Opinion Tool, which allows users to explore respondents’ opinions about how different combinations of policies would likely affect a variety of outcomes related to gun ownership.

This report presents findings from an updated version of the survey fielded in 2020.

Our respondent sample included academic researchers with an established track record in researching gun policy effects, individuals nominated as experts by staff from gun policy advocacy groups or organizations with a professional interest in gun policy, individuals who have published commentaries on gun policy for research organizations or policy institutes, and staff serving on congressional committees that routinely consider gun legislation. In this report, for simplicity, we refer to these respondents as gun policy experts. By consulting experts with a variety of backgrounds, we intended to capture perspectives that are likely to be especially influential in shaping both public opinion and legislation related to gun policies.

The processes for identifying our sample, designing the survey, and fielding the survey largely followed those used for the 2016 survey. However, in the 2020 survey, we • solicited expert opinion about five new policies • added new respondents • re-surveyed original respondents to ask about additional policies and outcomes • implemented changes to question presentation to improve clarity.