Definition
The Gun Control Support Score predicts a person's likelihood to believe that gun violence would decrease if fewer civilians had access to guns. Individuals with higher scores indicate greater likelihood of supporting the position that reducing civilian gun access would decrease gun violence.
Technical Details
The model was built from the following polling question:
Gun violence would decrease if fewer civilians had access to guns.
- Strongly Disagree
- Disagree
- Neither Agree nor Disagree
- Agree
- Strongly Agree
Respondents who answered “Strongly Agree” or “Agree” were labeled as gun control supporters. Respondents who answered “Strongly Disagree” or “Disagree” were labeled as non-supporters.
The Gun Control Support Score was trained on polling data from the Winter 2025 Murmuration poll. We collected 8,002 responses online from registered voters in December 2025. The survey used stratified random sampling to ensure national representativeness across age, race, gender, partisanship, education and geography.
The model was trained using gradient-boosted decision trees. Model features were drawn from the Atlas by Murmuration dataset, which includes demographic (age, race, gender, etc.), commercial, geographic, and vote history information for all registered voters nationally.
Scores range from 0-100, where higher scores indicate greater likelihood that a voter supports gun control. The score represents the model's predicted probability (scaled to 0-100) that an individual believes restricting gun access would reduce gun violence.
We validated the model's accuracy using a held-out set of 1,543 polling respondents (20% of the original survey sample) whose data was not used during model development. Among individuals with scores in the top 20% of the Gun Control Support Score, 93% are actual gun control supporters—making them 65% more likely to support gun control than the average voter.
Use Cases
- Persuasion and Education Campaigns: The Gun Control Support Score helps campaigns identify moderate and persuadable voters who may support gun safety measures but need activation on this issue. Partners can use mid-range Gun Control Support Scores to find swing voters with latent gun safety concerns, moderate Republicans who support common sense restrictions, and independents who may be open to gun violence prevention messaging. This score can be layered with Partisan Scores to identify cross-pressured voters who hold gun policy views that don't align with their typical partisan behavior. Persuasion campaigns benefit from targeting voters who show some support for reducing gun access but may need additional information about community safety impacts, gun violence statistics, or specific policy solutions to strengthen their position.
- Base Mobilization and GOTV: Partners can use high Gun Control Support Scores to identify strong supporters of gun violence prevention for turnout and volunteer recruitment efforts. These high scoring individuals represent the core base on gun safety issues and are prime candidates for get-out-the-vote programs. Partners should consider layering Gun Control Support with turnout propensity scores to prioritize likely voters, volunteer propensity scores to recruit activists, and donation scores to identify potential contributors. This approach ensures that voter contact resources are directed toward supporters who are both aligned on gun policy and likely to participate in electoral activities.
- Coalition Building and Community Engagement: The Gun Control Support Score enables partners to find voters who support gun access restrictions but may not be reached through traditional progressive outreach channels. This score is particularly valuable when layered with demographic data and geographic targeting in communities affected by gun violence. Organizations working with gun violence survivors, parents, educators, and healthcare professionals can use this score to identify supporters in their networks and surrounding communities. Community groups can use Gun Control Support to prioritize outreach in areas where residents have direct experience with gun violence, ensuring that organizing efforts focus on those most likely to be responsive to gun safety messaging.
Targeting Table
The table below shows the score values associated with each decile to help you more easily target using the Gun Control Support Score nationally. Note: these score cutoffs may be different in your local districts.
| To target the top... | Set the minimum score value as... |
| 10% | 88 |
| 20% | 83 |
| 30% | 78 |
| 40% | 71 |
| 50% | 61 |
| 60% | 49 |
| 70% | 39 |
| 80% | 31 |
| 90% | 23 |
| 100% | 3 |