Americans in All Congressional Districts Strongly Support Background Checks and Safe Storage Laws for Guns

Chris Krenn, co-founder of democracyGPS.org

Published in

Finding Democracy

3 min readApr 30, 2024

National polling, for example, Fox News (2023) and AMP Research (2019), shows broad consensus support for background checks for gun purchases and safe gun storage. As part of an ongoing study sponsored by democracyGPS, we report recent polling data on these issues and show strong support in all 435 US Congressional districts based on recent voting history in the districts (FiveThirtyEight, 2022) and gun ownership rates (RAND, 2020). We find less support for bans on assault weapons or large magazines.

Polling

We conducted a nationwide poll of 560 adults on April 3rd, 2024 using Survey Monkey Audience. Poll respondents came from 48 states (Fig 1) and represented US age and gender distributions from the 2020 census.

Figure 1: Map of the locations of survey participants

Table 1 summarizes the key poll results. More than 65% of respondents identifying as Republican or conservative supported both background check and safe storage laws for guns. Only between 40% and 60% of Republicans or conservatives supported bans on assault weapons or large magazines.

Table 1: Support for four proposed laws designed to reduce gun violence found in an April 2024 national survey.

Modelling

We used a Monte Carlo variant of multilevel regression with poststratification (Wikipedia, 2024) to generate representative populations of each US congressional district based on recent voting histories and gun ownership rates. We used data from the 2015 Pew Religious Landscape Study to estimate state-by-state populations of centrist voters who don’t lean toward the Democratic or Republican parties. We have also posted the data and code used on GitHub. Figs 2 & 3 summarize the results. Fig 2 shows estimated support from all voters in each district. We estimate that more than 75% of voters in the country's most conservative districts support background check and safe storage laws.

Figure 2: Estimated support, in all US House districts, for four proposed laws designed to reduce gun violence. Low values of lean, based on FiveThirtyEight data on recent district voting histories, describe more Republican districts. High values of lean describe more Democratic districts. Gun ownership rates are from a 2020 RAND report.

Fig 3 shows the estimated support of voters who identify as Republican or conservative in each district. A clear majority of these voters (more than 70%) also support both background check and safe storage laws.

Figure 3: Estimated support among Republican and conservative voters, in all US House districts, for four proposed laws designed to reduce gun violence.

About

democracyGPS is a non-partisan and non-profit organization dedicated to identifying consensus on a broad range of political issues using dynamic surveys, validating that consensus using unbiased national polling, and persuading the US Congress and other politicians to better represent their voters by passing bipartisan legislation.