Some Facts About Guns in American Society

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Abstract (click here to go to article)

Americans can be divided into two groups: those who own guns and those who do not. Although people who own guns and people who do not own guns are often separated along social, cultural, and political lines, it is unclear whether these divisions might extend to population differences in emotional experience. In this paper, we use national cross-sectional data from the 2014 Chapman University Survey on American Fears (n = 1385) to test whether gun owners are more or less afraid than people who do not own guns. We build on previous work by testing two hypotheses with a broad range of fear-related outcomes, including specific phobias and fears associated with being victimized. Ordinary least squares and negative binomial regression models suggest that people who own guns tend to report lower levels of phobias and victimization fears than people who do not own guns. This general pattern is observed across multiple indicators of fear (e.g., of animals, heights, zombies, and muggings), multiple outcome specifications (continuous and count), and with adjustments for age, gender, race/ethnicity, education, household income, marital status, the presence of children, religious identity, religiosity, religious attendance, political orientation, region of residence, and urban residence. Additional longitudinal research is needed to confirm our findings with a wider range of covariates and fear-related outcomes.

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In this paper, we document the social patterning of recent gun purchases to advance a contemporary social epidemiology of the pandemic arms race. We employ cross-sectional survey data from the 2020 Health, Ethnicity and Pandemic Study, which included a national sample of 2,709 community-dwelling adults living in the United States. We use binary logistic regression to model recent pandemic gun purchases as a function of age, sex, race/ethnicity, nativity status, region of residence, marital status, number of children, education, household income, pandemic job change, religious service attendance, pandemic religion change, and political party. Overall, 6% of the sample reported purchasing a new gun during the pandemic. Multivariate regression results suggest that pandemic gun purchasers tend to be male, younger, US-born, less educated, recently unemployed, experiencing changes in their religious beliefs, Republicans, and residents of southern states. To our knowledge, we are among the first to formally document a new population of pandemic gun owners that is characterized by youth, US-nativity, and religious volatility. Our analyses underscore the need for public health initiatives designed to enhance gun-related safety during pandemics, including, for example, addressing underlying motivations for recent gun purchases and improving access to training programs.

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Although debates over guns and gun control have roiled the contemporary political scene, the role of religion has received only limited attention from scholars. We contribute to this literature by developing a series of theoretical arguments linking one specific facet of religion –belief in supernatural evil (i.e., the Devil/Satan, Hell, and demons)—and a range of gun policy attitudes. Relevant hypotheses are then tested using data from the 2014 Baylor Religion Survey (n = 1572). Results show that belief in supernatural evil is a robust predictor of support for policies that expand gun rights. Overall, the estimated net effects of belief in supernatural evil withstand statistical controls for a host of sociodemographic covariates, and, importantly, political ideology. Very few other aspects of religion are associated with any of these gun policy attitudes. Implications and study limitations are discussed, and promising directions for future research on religion and guns are identified.

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Although several studies have examined race differences in gun-related attitudes, researchers are only beginning to explore how racial attitudes might contribute to the gun policy preferences of white Americans. While many white Americans tend to oppose firearm restrictions, it is unclear whether racialized policy preferences tend to support these leanings. Our analysis of national data from Wave 4 of the Baylor Religion Survey (n = 1,063) indicates that white Americans who report more implicit resentment are more likely to support policies that would increase the number of armed people in schools and allow more people to carry concealed firearms and less likely to support policies that would limit the possession of handguns, semiautomatic weapons, and high-capacity magazines. Interestingly, white Americans who report more implicit resentment are also less likely to support policies that would expand gun safety programs and background checks that include mental health screenings. These associations persisted with adjustments for age, gender, race or ethnicity, education, household income, marital status, the presence of children, religious identity, religiosity, political orientation, region of residence, and urban residence. We conclude that implicit resentment is consistently associated with less restrictive and more precarious gun policy preferences among white Americans. These patterns are noteworthy because they support the same general conclusion: white Americans who report more implicit resentment tend to want more guns in society with fewer legal restrictions related to access and safety.

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In this paper, we use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health and latent class analysis to assess the extent to which individuals integrate guns into broader health lifestyles. We also examine how these new health lifestyles differ for men and women. While men integrate guns with a variety of risk-taking behaviors, including smoking, heavy drinking, risky sexual behavior, and fast-food consumption, women do not. Our results are consistent with a gendered theory of gun ownership and health lifestyles. On the one hand, some men may use guns and other risky health behaviors to project hegemonic masculinity. On the other hand, some women may avoid guns and other elements of risky lifestyles to signify normative femininity. It is important for sociologists and public health scholars to focus more on how and why men are more likely to integrate guns into generally unhealthy lifestyles.

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In this study, we formally examine the association between penis size dissatisfaction and gun ownership in America. The primary hypothesis, derived from the psychosexual theory of gun ownership, asserts that men who are more dissatisfied with the size of their penises will be more likely to personally own guns. To test this hypothesis, we used data collected from the 2023 Masculinity, Sexual Health, and Politics (MSHAP) survey, a national probability sample of 1,840 men, and regression analyses to model personal gun ownership as a function of penis size dissatisfaction, experiences with penis enlargement, social desirability, masculinity, body mass, mental health, and a range of sociodemographic characteristics. We find that men who are more dissatisfied with the size of their penises are less likely to personally own guns across outcomes, including any gun ownership, military-style rifle ownership, and total number of guns owned. The inverse association between penis size dissatisfaction and gun ownership is linear; however, the association is weakest among men ages 60 and older. With these findings in mind, we failed to observe any differences in personal gun ownership between men who have and have not attempted penis enlargement. To our knowledge, this is the first study to formally examine the association between penis size and personal gun ownership in America. Our findings fail to support the psychosexual theory of gun ownership. Alternative theories are posited for the apparent inverse association between penis size dissatisfaction and personal gun ownership, including higher levels of testosterone and constructionist explanations.

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Although there is no empirical evidence linking gun ownership with better sleep, speculation is widespread in gun culture. We assess the direct association between gun ownership and sleep disturbance and whether gun ownership moderates the association between neighborhood fear and sleep disturbance. We use four waves of cross-sectional data from the General Social Survey (2010–2018) and logistic regression to model sleep disturbance as a function of gun ownership and test the statistical interaction of gun ownership and neighborhood fear. Our analyses demonstrate that gun ownership is unrelated to sleep disturbance across sleep specifications. None of the statistical interactions between gun ownership and neighborhood fear reached statistical significance. Although being afraid to walk alone at night in one's neighborhood is associated with restless sleep, owning a gun is no consolation. In ancillary analyses, we observed that gun ownership is unrelated to sleep disturbance across survey years and a range of subpopulations. In the first empirical study of gun ownership and sleep, we find consistent evidence to suggest that people who own guns do not report better sleep in general or in the context of living in a dangerous neighborhood. Our analyses are important because they contribute to our understanding of the epidemiology of sleep. They also challenge theoretical perspectives and cultural narratives about how having a gun in the home helps individuals and their families to feel safe, secure, and protected. Additional research is needed to replicate our findings using longitudinal data and more reliable measures of sleep disturbance.

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Although there is widespread speculation about guns helping people to sleep better, this idea has only recently faced empirical scrutiny. We test whether people who own guns tend to exhibit healthier sleep outcomes than people who do not own guns and whether the association between community stress and sleep is less pronounced for people who own guns.

We use ordinary least squares, multinomial logistic, and binary logistic regression to model cross-sectional survey data.

Our data span the United States.

The 2021 Crime, Health, and Politics Survey (CHAPS) is based on a national probability sample of 1714 adults.

Our analyses include multiple measures of gun ownership (personal ownership, keeping a gun in one's bedroom, and COVID-19 pandemic gun purchases), community stress (neighborhood disorder, neighborhood danger during the pandemic, and perceptions of police protection), and sleep (insomnia symptoms, sleep duration, and pandemic sleep).

We found that people who own guns and people who do not own guns tend to exhibit similar sleep outcomes and that people who experience community stressors tend to exhibit similar sleep outcomes regardless of gun ownership.

Our analyses confirm that gun ownership is unrelated to sleep and that guns are insufficient to mitigate the detrimental effects of community stress on sleep. We extend prior work by (a) using more detailed measurements of gun ownership, community stress, and sleep, (b) assessing whether people keep a gun in their bedroom, and (c) exploring the intersection of pandemic gun purchases and pandemic sleep quality.

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Although there has been no direct empirical evidence linking sexual dysfunction (SD) with gun ownership, speculation has been widespread and persistent for decades. In this paper, we formally examine the association between SD and gun ownership. Our primary hypothesis, derived from the psychosexual theory of gun ownership, asserts that men experiencing SD are more likely to personally own guns than other men. To test this hypothesis, we used recently collected data from the 2021 Crime, Health, and Politics Survey (CHAPS), a national probability sample of 780 men, and binary logistic regression to model gun ownership as a function of SD. Our key finding is that men experiencing SD are no more likely to own guns than men without SD. This interpretation was supported across several indicators of SD (performance anxiety, erection trouble, and ED medication) and gun ownership (personal gun ownership, purchasing a gun during the pandemic, and keeping a gun in one’s bedroom). To our knowledge, we are the first to have directly tested the association between SD and gun ownership in America. Our findings are important because they contribute to our understanding of factors associated with gun ownership by challenging the belief that phallic symbolism and masculinity somehow drive men with SD to purchase guns. Our results also remind us of the perils of gun culture rhetoric, which, in this case, function to discredit gun owners and to further stigmatize men with ED. We conclude by calling for more evidence-based discussions of SD and guns in society.