Short version: having a gun provides gun owners with a sense of control and safety. At the same time, having a gun makes gun owners more attuned to the dangers around them, leading them to feel that the world is a more dangerous place, in turn justifying their decision to have a gun. Bit of a feedback loop there.
To get a sense of how guns change the psychological landscape of their owners, we divided our gun-carrying group into two. When we texted one half of the group, before we asked any other questions, we simply asked whether they had their gun accessible and why they’d made that decision. For the other half of our gun-owning participants, and for our non-gun-owning control group, firearms and firearm carrying never came up.
When subtly reminded of guns in general – regardless of whether their gun was accessible – our participants reported feeling more safe and in control and that their lives were more meaningful. Thanks to our random-assignment procedure, we can be pretty confident that it was thinking about guns, as opposed to any differences in the underlying groups themselves, that caused this particular increase in psychological well-being.
Not much of a surprise, actually. It’s one of the classic arguments against owning guns; that having one makes a person both irrationally confident and more prone to turn to lethal violence as a solution. An idea dating back decades at the least, I recall seeing it used in fiction from the 50s and 60s so it’s at least that old.
A thing missing from all this is that there is tremendous fear-mongering in the gun-oriented and generic RW media that induces a fear and suspicion mindset in everyone who consumes it.
Now that audience has been primed to see potential attackers everywhere, crime behind every bush, and dangerous confrontation at every traffic light.
So they get a gun. And unless they just throw it in a drawer & forget about it, then to some degree they’ll have to immerse themselves in the culture of gun shows, gun ranges, shooting classes, carry permit classes, gun stores to buy accessories and regular supplies of ammo, etc. All of which reinforce the idea that the need for firearms is real because the threat is omnipresent.
So there is a self-reinforcing tail-chasing going on within each gun owner. But there’s a very large external forcing function that starts the cyclone a-swirling and keeps it swirling.
I think we have to be careful about looking at gun ownership in too simplistic a way. My father owned a rifle, a shotgun, and a couple of pistols, but safety and fear didn’t play into it at all. He was a sportsman, and he used the weapons for hunting and for shooting contests. We lived in a beautiful community and never felt threatened.
I think, oddly, this article I’ve linked to may connect to this thread. Briefly, it suggests that fear of mortality pushes us to particular types of behaviour, such as consumerism, to increase our sense of safety and security (e.g., stockpiling groceries in the simplest case). It also makes us more likely to fall for authoritarian leaders. This seems like a similar mechanism to the one described in the OP.
Let me go out on a limb here to suggest it also supports @Ulfreida and their point in the thread on economic causes of fascism.
And how many gun owners are like that? Googling, only about 5% of the population hunts. And we’re a mostly-urban society, wild animals aren’t the main concern of most Americans. Most gun owners get guns for use against people.
Good point @Jasmine. There are really two only partly overlapping groups out there: sportsmen of whatever gender, and the home / personal defense folks. ETA: Also good point @Der_Trihs, that the sportsmen are a dwindling breed nationally. But depending on whether one lives urban or rural, the sportsmen may well be the local majority you see around you.
When I was in the military doing non-combat stuff in dangerous environments with dangerous people, being armed was expected. And I was. So I understand the mindset because there really were people, bad people, out to get us. So we were always vigilant and always armed and always ready. It was tiresome, but necessary.
Once I moved on from that job the psychological need to carry went away because my estimate of the threat in suburban, and urban, America was/is substantially zero. So I stopped carrying about 40 years ago.
But if something external was keeping that threat perception alive …
This reminds me of a recent study in JAMA that looked at changes in # of shootings in the weeks after the start of hunting season, which showed a substantial increase even after factoring out hunting accidents.
So, having a gun handy doesn’t just make you feel more threatened, it also makes you more likely to use it on another person.
The old Doc Savage pulp fiction novels from the 30s-40s always made the point that Doc rarely uses guns and never carries one himself, as carrying a gun makes you psychologically dependent on it. So yeah, not a new idea at all.
Basically inevitable, both for the psychological reasons mentioned already and the simple issue of availability. I expect there’s more assaults and murders with hammers around carpenters than most anywhere else, because they’ve got hammers. And guns are better at killing than most other things.
If you want to avoid mistakes and violence with a gun, not having a gun is the most effective method. Both because you won’t have one to do it, and because you won’t be primed to think in terms of solving your problems by shooting them if you lack a gun. I’m reminded of how on their contested border the Chinese and Indians don’t issue their soldiers guns, so the periodic violence never gets to the point of shooting.
The unique quality guns have is that their only purpose is to kill people (sport hunting aside). This is why we don’t see an increase of stonings by people who live in rocky places.
I see this in ads for local gun shows - “Get your guns while you still can!!!” I want to ask them how many guns did Obama confiscate when he was in office.
I worked with several people over the years who collected guns, but it was because they liked guns, not because they felt they needed an arsenal to be safe. Gotta have a hobby, right? Then I see photos people post with their firearms spread across their porch and I can’t help but think that they’d probably have a nicer porch if they didn’t spend all that money on guns. Whatevs…
I recall that one, he managed to horrify the local gun club (don’t recall if they were specifically NRA).
Well, also because guns are much better at killing; one reason we don’t see more people killed in stonings is because people are much more likely to survive somebody throwing a rock at them. One reason you see more killings with guns than other forms of violence is that if somebody shoots somebody else and stops or runs away*, the victim still has a good chance of dying.
“Shoot once and runs away” is a common behavior among violent gun-armed robbers, I understand. It’s why a criminal with a gun is more likely to kill you than one with a knife; guns are just that much more lethal.
Not a good point at all, because both sides are nowhere near equal. There is the fringe “hunt for food” element, and the rest of them, and no amount of “butwhatabout-the-hunterism” is going to excuse the vast majority of people who buy guns out of fear.