A Decade of Impact: Gun Policy in America

A collage of visualizations from ten years of the Gun Policy in America initiative

Image by Andrew Galvan/RAND

Published January 29, 2026

Preventing gun violence remains one of the most consequential and divisive public policy challenges in the United States. Firearms are deeply embedded in American culture, law, and identity. They also contribute to roughly 40,000 deaths and 80,000 or more injuries each year.

The lack of scientific evidence for various gun policies has hindered constructive dialogue and effective policymaking. For decades, the U.S. government rarely funded research in this area, resulting in inadequate data infrastructure to study gun violence and a relatively small literature of uneven quality assessing its causes and consequences. Without the expertise to distinguish credible research from misleading findings, citizens, journalists, and policymakers relied primarily on trusted voices within their own ideological communities to discern the meaning of apparently contradictory scientific findings.

Over nearly a decade, Gun Policy in America has grown into one of the most widely used and cited sources of evidence on U.S. gun policy.

RAND launched the Gun Policy in America initiative to address these challenges. Our goal was not to advocate for particular policies but to establish a shared and trustworthy foundation of evidence—rigorously assessed, transparently presented, and accessible to the public—that could inform policy discussions regardless of participants' ideological commitments.

Over nearly a decade, Gun Policy in America has grown into one of the most widely used and cited sources of evidence on U.S. gun policy. Here, we describe how this initiative began, what it built, how it has influenced policy and research, and why its work matters at a moment when reliable information is more important than ever.

An Authoritative and Objective National Resource on Gun Policy Evidence

The Gun Policy in America initiative began in January 2016 as an internal investment, made by RAND, to develop resources to provide credible, objective information that could support the development of fair and effective gun policies.

The initiative, which for the past eight years has been supported by Arnold Ventures, was designed around several core principles:

  • Neutrality and independence: The initiative would evaluate evidence using consistent and transparent standards, but it would not advocate for specific policy choices.
  • Methodological rigor. Our original research and systematic reviews of others' research would focus on the methodological rigor of their studies, including the credibility of their causal claims and the accuracy of their characterization of uncertainty about policy effects.
  • Comprehensiveness. Rather than focusing on a single policy or outcome, the initiative would examine a range of firearm laws and their potential effects, including outcomes of greatest concern to the stakeholders on different sides of gun policy debates.
  • Public accessibility. We would make our findings, data, and tools available to policymakers, journalists, researchers, and the public; this information would be in usable formats, not buried in paywalled academic journals.
  • Transparency and reproducibility. Whenever feasible, we would publicly document our research questions, analytic plans, and criteria for drawing conclusions prior to our analysis, thus increasing transparency and reducing the risk that our findings would be shaped by post‑hoc analytic decisions. In addition, we would share code, interim analytic products, and data to allow scrutiny, replication, and reuse.

What Gun Policy in America Built

The Science of Gun Policy

The centerpiece of the initiative is The Science of Gun Policy, our systematic review of research on firearm law effects across a range of outcomes, which uses a transparent evaluation approach, including explicit, publicly reported criteria to assess study design, methodological quality, and the strength of studies' causal claims.

Across five editions, the review has examined the effects of 18 types of gun policies—such as background checks, child-access prevention laws, concealed-carry regulations, and stand-your-ground laws—across the following eight outcome domains:

  • violent crime
  • suicide
  • mass shootings
  • defensive gun use
  • police shootings
  • gun industry outcomes
  • hunting and recreational firearm use.

One of the review's defining features is its explicit characterization of uncertainty. For many policy–outcome combinations, the available evidence is limited, mixed, or methodologically weak. Using this evidence can result in contradictory findings that are cherry-picked by advocates on all sides of gun policy debates. Our approach has instead been to identify where evidence is supportive, inconclusive, or insufficient. This approach has helped clarify not only what is known but also how much confidence decisionmakers should place in available studies.

Foundational Data Infrastructure

In addition to synthesizing existing research, the Gun Policy in America project invested heavily in building new, publicly available data resources that address longstanding gaps in firearm research.

Key datasets include:

  • The RAND State Firearm Laws Database: Research on the effectiveness of gun policies was severely hampered by a lack of data on when and where various policies had been implemented. The Gun Policy in America initiative addressed this gap by systematically coding thousands of state firearm laws from 1979 to the present, allowing researchers to track policy variations over time and use those variations to estimate law effects.
  • State-level household firearm ownership estimates: This dataset was developed using multiple data sources, including available survey data and multiple proxy measures of gun ownership to produce the first state-level time series of household gun ownership. Updates to the dataset over time have produced estimates for population subgroups defined by age, race, gender, and other demographics, supporting research on the differential effects of gun policies.
  • Estimates of nonfatal firearm injuries requiring hospitalization: This dataset addresses an outcome for which national data have historically been sparse but where harms and the possible effects of gun policies are enormous.
  • Curated datasets related to background checks, firearm violence outcomes, policy effect estimates and related data abstracted from the available literature, and expert opinion; These datasets are designed to support both RAND and external research.

Strengthening the Rigor of Gun Policy Evaluation

The Gun Policy in America initiative has also played a central role in advancing methods for studying gun policy. The initiative has

  • documented common sources of statistical bias and error in research literature
  • highlighted key challenges for measuring the dynamics of gun policy effects, such as on statistically rare outcomes (e.g., mass shootings) or on policies that have been implemented in few states
  • assessed whether the causal assumptions of commonly used methods are justified, and whether these methods can correctly identify true causal effects.

The initiative has demonstrated how many widely used research designs can produce misleading results, and publications through the initiative have proposed and demonstrated more-robust alternatives. By setting higher standards for transparency, preregistration, and replication, the Gun Policy in America initiative has helped strengthen the overall quality of research in the field.

Public-Facing Digital Tools

Recognizing that evidence is useful only if it is accessible, the Gun Policy in America initiative developed a suite of interactive online tools and visualizations. These include:

These tools have allowed users to explore complex information intuitively or more analytically, making the evidence more broadly accessible to journalists, policymakers, and the public.

Gun Policy in America's Impact

Informing Policy at the Federal and State Levels

The Gun Policy in America initiative is a trusted and frequently cited source that has informed policy discussions across all branches of government. RAND researchers associated with the initiative have provided testimony to Congress, including during deliberations that preceded the restoration of federal funding for gun violence research after a 25-year hiatus.

The Surgeon General's groundbreaking 2024 advisory on gun violence in America cited the Gun Policy in America initiative as one of just a few key resources it recommended.

After Congress passed that legislation in 2019, the initiative's work informed consultations with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ahead of its first major gun violence research solicitation in decades, as well as discussions with the White House Domestic Policy Council, the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and majority and minority committee staff in the House and Senate. Findings from the initiative's publications have been cited on the floor of the Senate and in the Supreme Court's 2022 New York State Rifle and Pistol Association, Inc., v. Bruen decision, which curtailed discretionary concealed-carry licensing and rewrote the framework for evaluating Second Amendment claims. The Surgeon General's groundbreaking 2024 advisory on gun violence in America cited the Gun Policy in America initiative as one of just a few key resources it recommended.

The Gun Policy in America initiative has informed legislative deliberations across a range of policy contexts. RAND researchers have testified in statehouse gun policy hearings in Pennsylvania and Vermont, met with state legislators from across the United States, and presented findings at large convenings of state and local policymakers. Gun Policy in America work has been cited in debates and legislative analyses addressing states' responses to the Bruen decision (e.g., California), stand‑your‑ground laws (Ohio), community violence prevention (Virginia), safe-storage requirements (Louisiana), taxation of firearms and ammunition (California), and gun buyback programs (Texas). In addition, this research has been regularly featured in statehouse testimony in many other states, including Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Nevada, Oregon, and Rhode Island.

Shaping Media Coverage

The initiative has become a go-to resource for journalists seeking neutral, evidence-based context on gun policy. Gun Policy in America research is cited between 75 and100 times per year in major media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, and USA Today. Editorial boards at major news organizations cite our work, including in editorials in The Washington Post, Bloomberg News and The Los Angeles Times.

Researchers from the Gun Policy in America initiative have contributed invited commentaries on gun policy evidence to The Washington Post, CNN, Newsweek, The Hill, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and other major news media, as well as to high profile scientific journals, such as Science and JAMA. Gun Policy in America researchers are regularly consulted by journalists to discuss gun policy evidence and often are featured in such stories.

By clearly distinguishing between what is supported by evidence and what remains uncertain, the initiative has helped improve the quality of media coverage on firearm violence and gun policy.

Advancing the Research Field

The initiative has had a profound influence on the academic community that investigates firearm violence and its prevention. The initiative's datasets and reviews are widely cited and used by researchers around the world, and its methodological contributions have shaped how gun policy studies are designed, evaluated, and reported.

The initiative's datasets and reviews are widely cited and used by researchers around the world, and its methodological contributions have shaped how gun policy studies are designed, evaluated, and reported.

The State Firearm Law Navigator, the Household Firearm Ownership estimates, and our estimates of state firearm ihospitalizations have been used to support and improve dozens of new gun policy studies by researchers from a variety of disciplines.

RAND's own gun policy research drawing on these resources has appeared in leading scientific journals, including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA Network Open, and the American Journal of Public Health.

Public Reach

Gun Policy in America's informative and engaging webpages have ranked among the most visited among RAND's more than 80,000 webpages, regularly attracting 20,000 visits per month and occasionally more than 100,000. More than 3,000 subscribers receive initiative updates on new research and tools, and the initiative's findings and products are regularly shared by RAND with the organization's hundreds of thousands of followers on social media platforms.

The Gun Policy in America Initiative Is Ending, but the Need for Objective Information on Gun Policy Is Greater Than Ever

The Gun Policy in America initiative has demonstrated that it is possible to bring rigor, transparency, and balance to one of the country's most contentious policy debates. By focusing on evidence rather than advocacy, the initiative has developed a trusted, nonpartisan brand that has informed policy debates with reliable, objective information while also strengthening the quality of the underlying research needed for those debates.

The recently released fifth edition of The Science of Gun Policy will be the final update to our review; the Gun Policy in America initiative is now winding down. Its legacy is not only a set of reports and tools but a model for how deeply polarized policy issues can be addressed through the careful synthesis of evidence, an honest acknowledgment of uncertainty, and a commitment to public accessibility.

Today, that model is especially needed. In the United States, gun policies of every kind are being reconsidered and relitigated in the wake of the Supreme Court's 2022 Bruen decision, which fundamentally altered the standards used to assess the constitutionality of firearm laws. As courts, legislatures, and the public grapple with these changes, the demand for reliable, objective, and trusted information about the real-world effects of gun policies has become unusually acute. Whether this moment leads to more-informed decisionmaking will depend on whether a shared, credible evidence base is available when it is needed most.

Gun Policy in America Co-Leads