In-home firearm access among US adolescents and the role of religious subculture: Results from a nationally representative study

Stroope, Samuel; Tom, Joshua C.

doi:10.1016/j.ssresearch.2017.06.001

Cited by 17 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 111 publications

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“…Our data also confirm others' work showing adolescent easy access to firearms associated with greater violent offending and victimization (Resnick et al, 1997;Ruback et al, 2011) and higher suicidality and more problematic drug use (Resnick et al, 1997;Swahn et al, 2002). Like Swahn et al (2002) and Stroope and Tom (2017), we also confirmed that easy firearm access is associated with numerous distinctive behavioral patterns. Easy access to guns has been associated with having parents who were white, lived in two-parent families, did not receive welfare and had mothers with a high school education or higher (Swahn et al, 2002).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

Unraveling the Complex Web of Associations Between Easy Access to Firearms and Premature Mortalities

Feigelman

Rosen

Cerel

2019

Suicide & Life Threat Behav

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Objective We investigated whether high school students reporting easy access to guns were more likely to die prematurely from either suicide, homicide, or an accidental death. Method Based upon the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, we contrasted those reporting easy access to guns, n = 5,185, 25%, with the remaining 75% (n = 15,589) on various sociodemographic characteristics, behaviors, and premature mortalities. Results We found higher rates of suicides, homicides, and accidental deaths among those reporting easy access to guns at Wave 1 or Wave 2. This was only true for males. Those with easy access to guns were more likely to share common sociodemographic characteristics, came from two‐parent homes where children had strong and close relationships with parents, where children were more likely to get into fights, do delinquent misdeeds, and engage in other risk‐taking behaviors such as increased drinking, drug use, and riding motorcycles. Logistic regression analysis showed easy access to guns remained a significant predictor of premature mortalities when sex, family income differences, risk‐taking, and delinquency were used as covariates. Conclusions This study supports previous research and carves out new ground showing easy access to guns acts synergistically with other lifestyle differences to diminish youth life chances.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

Unraveling the Complex Web of Associations Between Easy Access to Firearms and Premature Mortalities

Feigelman

Rosen

Cerel

2019

Suicide & Life Threat Behav

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“…Yamane (2016) showed that while theologically conservative Americans are more likely to own handguns, the religiously active are less likely to do so. He also found that Evangelical Protestants, when compared to Mainline Protestants, are more likely to own handguns (also see Stroope and Tom 2017). Further demonstrating the complex relationship between religion and guns, Mencken and Froese (2017) found a curvilinear relationship between church attendance and the degree of empowerment gun owners derive from owning guns.…”

Section: Religion and The Sacred Gunmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…Instead, their entrenched opposition to gun control is grounded in a particular symbolic system about the role of Christianity in the public sphere. In their study on adolescent access to in-home firearms, Stroope and Tom (2017) proposed that their findings about conservative Protestants being more likely to have guns in the home could be due to conservative Protestants' greater belief that the United States is a Christian nation established on, among other things, the right to bear arms. Due to data limitations Stroope and Tom (2017) were unable to directly test this cultural mechanism.…”

Section: Religion and The Sacred Gunmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gun Control in the Crosshairs: Christian Nationalism and Opposition to Stricter Gun Laws

Whitehead¹,

Schnabel²,

Perry³

2018

Preprint

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Despite increasingly frequent mass shootings and a growing dissatisfaction with current gun laws, American opposition to federal gun legislation remains strong. We show that opposition to stricter gun control is closely linked to Christian nationalism, a religious cultural framework that mandates a symbiotic relationship between Christianity and civil society. Using data from a national population-based survey, we show that Christian nationalism is an exceptionally strong predictor of opposition to the federal government enacting stricter gun laws. In fact, of all the variables we considered only general political orientation has more predictive power than Christian nationalism. We propose that the gun control debate is complicated by deeply held moral and religious schemas that discussions focused solely on rational public safety calculations do not sufficiently address. For the substantial proportion of American society who are Christian nationalists, gun rights are God-given and sacred. Consequently, attempts to reform existing gun laws must attend to the deeper cultural and religious identities that undergird Americans’ beliefs about gun control.

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“…Some scholars choose to explain this relationship by pointing to a distinctive Protestant and especially white evangelical Protestant––culture. Scholars have defined this culture as both conservative and fundamentalist, with embeddedness in this culture acting as a strong influence over an individual's propensity to own a gun (Stroope and Tom 2017; Yamane 2017a). Particular beliefs within this tradition have also been shown to predict gun ownership, including biblical inerrancy, the punitiveness of God, and moral convictions of sin (Hempel, Matthews, and Bartkowski 2012; Young 1989; Young and Thompson 1995).…”

Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Gun Ownership

Vegter

Kelley

2020

Scientific Study of Religion

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This question on how religious beliefs shape attitudes about guns has received little attention in the literature. We use the religious concept of supernatural evil, or beliefs about Satan, Hell, Armageddon, and demons, to provide context for ideas about gun ownership and the development of attitudes toward gun policy. While this has been explored quantitatively using national survey data, we argue that an in‐depth qualitative approach provides necessary nuance. As part of an ongoing ethnography in Northeastern Kansas, we conducted interviews with 55 women and 7 men who own and shoot guns. For this paper, we report on a religion module subsample that probes religiosity, spirituality, and gun ownership. Based on the rich contextual information from the interviews, we illuminate a package of beliefs that come together as an ethic, a set of moral principles guiding gun ownership for a subset of gun owners. We suggest the spirit of gun ownership is a bundle of duties that guide individual gun owners to stress the need to protect, be diligent, and defend. Moreover, belief in supernatural evil is bound up in policy attitudes that protect or expand gun rights.

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In-home firearm access among US adolescents and the role of religious subculture: Results from a nationally representative study

Cited by 17 publications

References 111 publications

Unraveling the Complex Web of Associations Between Easy Access to Firearms and Premature Mortalities

Unraveling the Complex Web of Associations Between Easy Access to Firearms and Premature Mortalities

Gun Control in the Crosshairs: Christian Nationalism and Opposition to Stricter Gun Laws

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Gun Ownership

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