Why Some Americans Buy Guns

In 2020, as many communities went into lockdown due to Covid, protesters flooded the streets, and economic uncertainty and social isolation deepened, Americans went shopping. For firearms.

Some 22 million guns were sold that year, 64 percent more than in 2019. More than eight million of those went to novices who had never owned a firearm, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearms industry’s trade association.

Gun homicides also increased that year, from 14,392 in 2019 to 19,350. Gun deaths, including suicides, rose from 39,702 in 2019 to 45,222 in 2020. Gun deaths increased again to 48,830 in 2021.

After 25 years of quashing gun violence research, Congress began funneling millions of dollars to federal agencies in 2021 to collect data.

Here’s what social psychologists think about who bought firearms, what motivated them, and how owning or even holding a firearm can change behavior.

Who started buying guns?

Millions of Americans who had never owned a gun purchased a firearm during a two-and-a-half year period beginning in January 2019, before the pandemic, and lasting through April 2021.

Of the 7.5 million people who bought their first firearm during that period, 5.4 million had lived in houses up to that point without guns, researchers at Harvard and Northeastern University estimate.

The new buyers were different from the white men who historically made up the majority of gun owners. Half were female and nearly half were colored (20 percent were black and 20 percent were Hispanic).

“The people who used to buy are still buying — they didn’t stop. But a whole different community of people has come in,” said Michael Anestis, the executive director of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center, who was not involved in the study. .

Why did Americans decide to buy guns?

Self-defense is the number one reason Americans buy handguns. Gun ownership is not just a constitutional right, but a necessary form of protection, according to organizations like the National Rifle Association and the National Shooting Sports Foundation.

A survey of individuals who said they planned to purchase a first or second firearm during the early days of the pandemic found that potential buyers rather saw the world as dangerous and more threatening than persons who had no intention of acquiring a firearm.

Those who intended to purchase firearms were more likely to agree strongly with statements such as “People can’t be trusted”, “People are not what they seem” and “You should be wary”, compared to those who did not purchase plan. Dr. Anestis, an author of the study.

Buyers were also more afraid of uncertainty. They generally very much agreed with statements such as “Unforeseen events upset me very much” and “I don’t like not knowing what comes next.”

According to the study, which was conducted in June and July 2020, they were especially afraid of Covid. Rather, they were essential workers. Dr. Anestis, who studies suicide, said those planning to buy a gun were also more likely to have suicidal thoughts.

More than half of all gun deaths in the United States are suicides. For example, in 2021, there were 48,830 gun deaths; 26,328 were suicides.

“Firearm owners are no more likely to have suicidal ideation than non-owners,” said Dr. Anestis. “But if you look at who bought a firearm during the gulf, and if it was their first firearm, they were much more likely than others to have had suicidal thoughts in the past month, year, or lifetime.”

Suicide rates have not increased during the pandemic, but the presence of a gun in the home increases the risk as long as the family owns the gun. And while research shows that some people buy a gun while planning suicide, most people who have used a gun to commit suicide have already owned the gun — for an average of 10 years.

Families with teens who had one firearm loaded and unlocked were more likely than those who kept guns to buy another firearm during the pandemic, other researchers have discovered. It is possible that the families kept guns readily accessible because they feared for their safety, and that this concern motivated the purchase of an additional firearm.

But these households are particularly vulnerable to gun injuries, said Rebeccah Sokol, a behavioral scientist at the University of Michigan and co-author of the study. “Teenagers have some of the highest rates of fatal and non-fatal injuries from firearms,” she added.

For some, guns bring comfort.

Experiments have shown that human touch can be remarkably soothing. For example, in a 2006 study, neuroscientists found that when married women were given mild electric shocks as part of an experiment, reach out to take their man’s hand immediately gave me a sense of relief.

Nick Buttrick, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wanted to know if firearms offered similar comfort to gun owners, serving as a kind of psychological safety blanket.

“The real question I wanted to answer was, what good is a gun to people?” he said. “Why would anyone want to take this really dangerous thing and bring it into their life?”

He recruited college students, some of whom came from households with gun owners, to take part in a study in which they would be exposed to very mild electric shocks (he compared the sensation to static electricity).

While the shocks were being administered, participants were given a friend’s hand, a metal object, or a prop that looked and felt like a gun but had no firing mechanism. For participants who grew up around guns, holding the prop that resembled a firearm provided the greatest comfort, said Dr. Buttrick.

“If you come from a household with guns, you already feel more comfortable carrying a gun,” says Dr. Buttrick, whose research has not yet been published.

For participants unfamiliar with guns, the opposite was true: they became more anxious when holding a replica firearm. “If you don’t come from a gun-wielding household, having a gun made the shock worse,” he said. “You were more tense.”

But security can be an illusion.

Advocacy organizations such as the NRA emphasize the need for safe handling and storage of firearms and offer training programs designed to make possession safer. But critics say public health officials have miscommunicated the risks to Americans.

Many studies have shown that easy access to firearms does not make the home safer. Instead, ownership increases the likelihood of both suicide and homicide, says Sarah Burd-Sharps, the senior research director for Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending gun violence.

One of the earliest studies to draw attention to the danger was a 1993 article in The New England Journal of Medicine that found that keeping a gun in the home was associated with a 2.7-fold increase in homicide risk, with nearly all shootings committed by relatives or intimate acquaintances . The findings have since been replicated in numerous studies.

“You are much more likely to fall victim to that gun than to successfully protect yourself,” Ms Burd-Sharps said, adding that gun owners “tragically don’t understand the risks”.

Carrying a gun can change the way a person perceives threats.

When Amadou Diallo was shot 41 times in the vestibule of his building in the Bronx more than two decades ago, police officers said they mistook the wallet he was holding for a gun. In 2014, a Cleveland police officer killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice because he thought the child’s “airsoft” replica pistol was a real gun.

Researchers are increasingly focusing on the idea that an armed person is more likely to see others as armed and react as if he or she is being threatened, a concept called gun embodiment.

“The idea behind embodiment is that your ability to act in the environment changes how you literally see the environment,” said Nathan Tenhundfeld, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a co-author of a recent study. “Gun execution takes the idea from the old colloquialism ‘When you hold a hammer, everything looks like a nail.'”

Stereotypes and emotions influence an observer’s ability to correctly identify a weapon and thus whether a given individual is actually armed. A study found that participants were more likely to mistakenly believe that a black person was holding a gun than to mistakenly think that a white man was armed.

In computer simulation studies, participants are more likely to shoot at a target that appears to be wearing a turban.

In a recent effort to replicate older studies on the embodiment of weapons, Dr. Tenhundfeld and his colleagues student a fake weapon or neutral object – a spatula. They held the objects as they watched images of guns and other ordinary objects appear on a computer screen.

They were asked to quickly decide whether to “fire” in response. When participants held the gun, they took longer to respond, had more difficulty quickly distinguishing between weapons and non-threatening objects, and made more mistakes.

“They weren’t biased — they just got it wrong more often, whether it was a gun or a shoe,” said Dr. Tenhundfeld.

It could be that this is a form of gun-embodiment, he said, adding that the participant’s “ability to act in the environment affects how they perceive the environment — that holding that gun distorts how you sees the world.”