Articlegold2019

Gun ownership and fear

Benjamin Dowd‐Arrow · Terrence D. Hill · Amy M. Burdette

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Gun Ownership and Violence Research Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence Crime Patterns and Interventions

Abstract

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. The symptom perspective argues that gun ownership is a behavioral expression of fear, that gun owners need guns to protect themselves because they are irrational cowards. Although binary logistic regression models provided minimal support for this idea, there was some evidence to suggest that the odds of gun ownership are higher for people who report being afraid of being victimized by a random/mass shooting. The palliative perspective claims that gun ownership mitigates fear, that owning a powerful weapon is somehow soothing to individuals and their families. 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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References

2005The Sociology of Emotions 2000Rethinking Social Reactions to Crime: Personal and Altruistic Fear in Family Households 1999Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control.1980Firearms Ownership for Sport and Protection: Two Divergent Models 2017Is It a Dangerous World Out There? The Motivational Bases of American Gun Ownership 2017The sociology of U.S. gun culture 1984Under the Gun: Weapons, Crime and Violence in America 1984Under the Gun: Weapons, Crime, and Violence in America.

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2019The psychology of guns: risk, fear, and motivated reasoning 2021Who Might Buy a Gun? Results from the Guns in American Life Survey 2021What Guns Mean: Who Sees Guns as Important, Essential, and Empowering (and Why)?2020New York State and the Nation: Trends in Firearm Purchases and Firearm Violence During the COVID-19 Pandemic 2021Peace through superior firepower: Belief in supernatural evil and attitudes toward gun policy in the United States

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