The 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 large-capacity 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 violence-prevention proposals, including policies affecting persons with mental illness; past research findings on Americans’ attitudes about policies for curbing gun violence 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 gun-owners 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.