After Newtown--public opinion on gun policy and mental illness.

T horrific loss of life at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012 has prompted a national conversation about guns and mental illness in the United States. This tragedy occurred less than 6 months after 70 people were shot in a movie theater in Colorado and after highly publicized mass shootings in Arizona and at Virginia Tech. These four events share two common characteristics: all four shooters were apparently mentally ill, and all four used guns with largecapacity magazines, allowing them to fire multiple rounds of ammunition without reloading. As policymakers consider options to reduce gun violence, they should understand public attitudes about various violenceprevention proposals, including policies affecting persons with mental illness; past research findings on Americans’ attitudes about policies for curbing gun violence1-3 need to be updated. In the aftermath of Sandy Hook, it’s also important to understand how Americans view mental illness. To examine these issues, we conducted two national public opinion surveys between January 2 and January 14, 2013, with the survey research firm GfK Knowledge Networks, using equal-probability sampling from a sample frame of residential addresses covering 97% of U.S. households. The surveys were pilot-tested December 28 through December 31, 2012. The order of the survey items was randomized. We fielded the gun-policy survey (n = 2703) and the mental illness survey (n = 1530) using different respondents to avoid priming effects. Survey completion rates were 69% and 70%, respectively. For the gun-policy survey, to report national rates of policy support and compare rates stratified according to respondents’ gun-ownership status, we oversampled both gunowners and non-owners living in households with guns. We reported the gun-policy results at the Summit on Reducing Gun Violence in America at Johns Hopkins University on January 15, 2013. Some 33% of respondents reported having a gun in their home or garage, an estimate that’s consistent with recent data from the General Social Survey and other surveys,4,5 though somewhat lower than a few 2013 polls have reported. Twenty-two percent of respondents identified the guns as personally belonging to them (“gun-owners”), and 11% identified themselves as non–gunowners living in a household with a gun. Among gun-owners, 71% reported owning a handgun, 62% reported owning a shotgun, and 61% reported owning a rifle. The remaining 67% of respondents identified themselves as non–gunowners living in households without guns (“non–gun-owners”). Majorities of the respondents supported all but 4 of 31 gun policies (see Table 1). Public support was particularly high for measures prohibiting certain persons from having guns, enhancing background checks, and instituting greater oversight of gun dealers. Even policies banning the sale of military-style semiautomatic weapons and large-capacity ammunition magazines were supported by more than 65% of the general public. We found smaller differences than we anticipated between gunowners and non–gun-owners. All policies bolstering background checks and oversight of gun dealers were supported by majorities of gun-owners, as were most policies prohibiting certain persons from having guns. A majority of members of the National Rifle Association (NRA) supported many of these policies as well. For instance, 84% of gun-owners and 74% of NRA members (vs. 90% of non–gun-owners) supported requiring a universal background-check system for all gun sales; 76% of gun-owners and 62% of NRA members (vs. 83% of non–gun-owners) supported prohibiting gun ownership for 10 years after a person has been convicted of violating a domesticviolence restraining order; and 71% of gun-owners and 70% of NRA members (vs. 78% of non– gun-owners) supported requiring a mandatory minimum sentence of 2 years in prison for a person convicted of selling a gun to someone who cannot legally have a gun. We found larger differences in support between non–gun-owners and gun-owners for policies banning the sale of semiautomatic assault weapons (77% vs. 46%),