Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Survey: Owners, non-owners are far apart on gun issues
WASHINGTON — Americans who own guns and those who don’t have starkly differing views about weapons, their role in society and their relationship to crime — disagreements that help explain why the national debate over gun control seldom moves.
About 30 percent of Americans own a gun, most of those more than one. A roughly equal number not only don’t own a firearm, but say they can’t see themselves ever having one.
Among those who do own guns, about half say that all or most of the people they know also are gun owners, and about eight in 10 say that at least some of their friends own guns. Among those who don’t own guns, only one in 10 say that all or most of their friends own weapons.
The numbers, from a major new study of gun ownership and attitudes toward guns by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, depict two camps that have become isolated from each other, even as the share of Americans who own a gun has declined.
Gun owners are much more likely to live in rural areas and non-owners in cities. Gun ownership is most common in the South, least common in the Northeast. Almost half of white men say they own a gun; only about a quarter of minority men, and fewer women, say the same.
The reasons for owning a gun appear to have shifted, as well. Among people over 65 who grew up in gun-owning households, about eight in 10 say the main reason then was hunting. That drops to half for those under 30 who grew up in a house with a gun.
Today, the most widely given reason for owning a gun is protection, cited by about two-thirds of gun owners surveyed. About one-third cited hunting as a major reason, and fewer, about one in eight gun owners, said they hunt often.
Another major reason appears to be identity and culture. About two-thirds of those who own a gun grew up in a household with one. That’s even more true in rural areas, where more than seven in 10 gun owners grew up in gun households.
Men who grew up in homes with guns say, on average, that they first shot a weapon at age 12.
About a quarter of gun owners say that having a weapon is a major part of their identity. Three-quarters call the right to own a weapon “essential” to their freedom.
By contrast, among those who don’t own a gun, most grew up in homes without firearms and only about one-third said they viewed the right to own weapons as essential to freedom.
Even as most gun owners say that protection is a major reason for owning a weapon, ownership has little relationship to people’s view of whether their community is safe or not.
Gun owners who feel their community is unsafe, however, are more likely than others to carry a weapon with them when they leave home.
Non-owners tend to associate guns with violence. About six in 10 non-owners call gun violence a “big problem” in the U.S. and about two-thirds say that the ease with which people can legally get a gun contributes a “great deal or a fair amount to gun violence.”
By contrast, only about a third of gun owners label gun violence as a big problem nationally. About four in 10 gun owners say that the ease of legally getting a weapon contributes a great deal or fair amount to that problem.
Majorities of both gun owners and non-owners groups agree that illegal gun purchases are a serious problem, and they agree on a couple of measures to deal with it.
On both sides, for example, overwhelming majorities support keeping guns away from the mentally ill. Nearly eight in 10 gun owners and almost nine in 10 non-owners support background checks for private sales of weapons and sales at gun shows.
The Pew survey was conducted in two waves, March 13-27 and April 4-18, among 3,930 members of the research group’s online American Trends Panel. The panel is a nationally representative sample of the public created by Pew for research purposes. Results have a margin of error of 2.8 percentage points in either direction.