Who Are the Liberal Gun Owners?

Abstract

In the recent renaissance of interest in guns among sociologists, studies of the political conservatism of gun owners have proliferated, but we still know very little about politically liberal gun owners. This despite the fact that one in five U.S. gun owners (some 12 million adults) self‐identifies as liberal. This exploratory study, therefore, seeks to understand what seems on the surface to be an interesting and not rare category in American society: the liberal gun owner. In particular, we seek to answer two questions: Do liberal gun owners differ from other liberals who do not own guns and from other gun owners who are not liberal? We answer these questions using data from the General Social Survey, treating liberal gun owners as a category rather than a point on a continuum. Binary and multinomial logistic regressions suggest ways in which liberal gun owners are a distinct group, more resembling their fellow gun owners in their demographic and geographic backgrounds, but differing from moderate and/or conservative gun owners in important ways, including in their propensity to be hunters, religious affiliation, religiosity, and punitive attitudes.

Transmitting Desire: An Experiment on a Novel Measure of Gun Desirability in a Pandemic

“…Warner (2020) found that participants who identified as men were significantly more open to future gun ownership, but only women had a significant association between perceived risk of crime and openness to gun ownership. This complexity partly confirms research (Mencken and Froese 2017; Yamane et al 2021) that different groups of gun owners have different underlying reasons for their gun ownership.…”

“…While gun owners largely remain white, middle-class, male, and Protestant relative to the U.S. population (Gallup, Inc. 2020; Legault and Lizotte 2009; Yamane, DeDeyne, and Méndez 2021), their demographics are shifting. Fewer new owners grew up with guns; new gun owners more often own handguns and identify as liberal, women, and nonwhite (Wertz et al 2018).…”

“…Approximately 12 million, or one out of every five, gun owners identify as liberal. Liberal gun owners prefer less punitive social policies, suggesting that researchers who analyze gun owners as a unitary conservative block may miss important sources of heterogeneity (Yamane et al 2021). Gun owners support laws restricting access to firearms (such as barring those convicted of felonies from purchase) and support background checks, but are averse to most other gun controls (Gallup, Inc. 2020; Smith 2003).…”

Who Are Gun Owners in the United States? A Latent Class Analysis of the 2019 National Lawful Use of Guns Survey

“…David Yamane (2017) showed that the gun culture was not monolithic and coined the terms gun culture 1.0 (the recreational one) and gun culture 2.0 (self-defense). In a more recent article, David Yamane et al (2021) focused on liberal gun owners, showing that they could be treated as a separate category within the population of gun owners as opposed to their being a point on a continuum. Boine et al (2020) divided the gun culture into three elements: recreation, self-defense, and Second Amendment advocacy.…”

Special Issue Editors’ Introduction: A Sociology of Firearms for the Twenty-First Century

“…For example, although the most typical gun owner may be politically conservative, the majority are not. One-in-five gun owners in America self-identify as politically liberal and another 40 percent see themselves as politically moderate (Yamane, DeDeyne, and Aravena Méndez 2021). This is especially true of new gun owners.…”