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Abstract

This article addresses two questions: (a) why do Americans believe that they need guns to defend themselves and their families and (b) why has the number of Americans who share this belief increased dramatically in recent decades? To address the first question, we describe a model of defensive gun ownership that assumes that Americans’ perceived need of a gun for self-defense is not only determined by their perceived lifetime risk of being assaulted (PLRA), but also by some diffuse belief in a dangerous world (BDW). In attempting to identify the dangerous world feared by high BDW gun owners, we review evidence that gun ownership is often associated with racial prejudice and concerns about groups that are stereotypically associated with safety threats (e.g., Black Americans, illegal immigrants). We identified three environmental changes that might exacerbate social threat perceptions: the proliferation of intergroup threat narratives such as the great replacement theory (that White Americans will be replaced by non-White minorities), the COVID-19 pandemic, and a change in the way the American gun industry advertises their products (praising the quality of their guns to emphasize the usefulness of guns for self-defense).

Keywords

belief in a dangerous world great replacement theory guns model of defensive gun ownership motivational basis of gun ownership perceived lifetime risk of assault racial prejudice self-protection

U.S. Americans lead the world in private gun ownership, possessing 45% of all civilian owned firearms in the world—an estimated 339 million firearms nationwide, which amounts to 4.6 firearms per individual (Small Arms Survey, 2007; Stroebe, 2013). Furthermore, the number of new U.S. gun owners is increasing every year. According to one estimate, 1 million adults became new gun owners annually between 2010 and 2015 (Wertz et al., 2018). This increase accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, when 2.9% of U.S. adults (7.5 million) became new gun owners (Miller et al., 2022).¹

What drives American gun ownership? In a Gallup survey conducted in 2021, 88% of gun owners gave “protection against crime” as their main reason for owning a gun, compared to 67% in 2000 (Jones, 2021). Similarly, according to an IPSOS survey of owners of military-style semiautomatic (AR-15 type) rifles, 65% of respondents marked “protect self, family, and property” as a major reason for gun ownership, and 42% indicated that they needed it in case “law and order broke down” (Frankel et al., 2023). This emphasis on self-defense as reason for gun ownership is a relatively recent cultural phenomenon in the United States. In a study of reasons for gun ownership that used several indicators for recreational and self-defense use, recreational uses (hunting, target shooting) were listed as most important in 1998, with self-defense being relatively unimportant (Boine et al., 2020). By 2016, this order had been reversed, and self-defense had become the main reason.

This is puzzling because the trend toward defensive gun ownership does not correspond to trends in violent crimes. Homicide rates are far below the numbers seen in 1990.² According to FBI data, the violent crime rate (rape, sexual assault, robbery, assault, and murder) fell by 49% between 1993 and 2019, with large decreases in the rates of robbery (−68%), murder/nonnegligent manslaughter (−47%), and aggravated assault (−43%). Meanwhile, the property crime rate fell 55%, with big declines in the rates of burglary (−69%), motor vehicle theft (−64%), and larceny/theft (−49%; Gramlich, 2020). Yet, people perceive the opposite to be occurring: Despite an objective decrease in violent crime rates, at least 60% of respondents in 20 of the 24 Gallup polls conducted since 1993 said that there was more crime nationally than there was the year before. Fewer expressed the same opinion about crime in their own area, however. So their estimates appear to be less based on personal experience and more on information from newspapers or social media. In 2020, this discrepancy was particularly marked, with 78% saying crime was up nationally, but only 38% stating that it was up locally (Gramlich, 2020). And yet, 80% of Americans indicated in a 2022 Gallup poll that they were either fairly or a great deal worried about crime, with Republicans being more worried than Democrats (Brenan, 2022).

A Model of the Motivational Bases of American Gun Ownership

This discrepancy indicates that people who own a gun for self-defense are not responding to an objective risk, but to a subjective risk of victimization. In contrast to criminological theories, which attribute the need for self-defense solely to “fear of crime” or “perceived risk of victimization” (Cao et al., 1997; DeJong, 1997; Kleck et al., 2011; Williams & McGrath, 1976), the psychological model of defensive gun ownership of Stroebe et al. (2017) postulated a second, unspecific threat perception that motivates people to own a gun. They proposed that the perceived need to own a gun for self-defense derived from two independent construals of threat, namely a specific threat, the perceived lifetime risk of assault (PLRA), and a diffuse threat, the belief in a dangerous world (BDW; Altemeyer, 1988; Duckitt, 2001). The belief in a dangerous world reflects a worldview or a system of beliefs about the nature of the social world. The BDW is not linked to a single objective threat in particular, and is associated with a conservative worldview and prejudice against minorities. The following two example items from a revised BDW scale are illustrative of it: “There are many dangerous people in our society, who will attack someone out of pure meanness, for no reason at all” and “Any day now, chaos and anarchy could erupt around us. All signs are pointing to it” (Duckitt, 2001, p. 69). This theory further predicts that the same perceived threats that motivate people to purchase a handgun (or a military style weapon) also shape their beliefs about defensive gun use and the fundamentality of their Second Amendment rights. This belief system includes not just the right to shoot and kill in threatening situations, but also opposition to laws that could interfere with gun rights.

Testing the Model of Defensive Gun Ownership

This model was supported in two studies with American gun owners (Kreienkamp et al., 2021; Stroebe et al., 2017). In the first study, Stroebe et al. (2017) assessed whether BDW and PLRA predicted the main reasons gun owners reported for owning their guns, as well as their beliefs about gun rights and when gun owners have the right to shoot and kill an intruder. BDW and PLRA were moderately correlated (r = .45). The strongest predictor of BDW was political orientation (i.e., conservatism), with victimization explaining only 2.2% of the variance. Unexpectedly, however, victimization accounted also for relatively little variance in PLRA (6%), which suggests that not even PLRA is strongly based on personal experience. A path analysis with structural equation modeling (SEM) suggested significant associations between both BDW and PLRA and owning a handgun for reason of self-defense, with the link from BDW being much stronger than that from PLRA. There was no reliable path from self-defense to long gun ownership (including AR-type rifles); long guns were mainly associated with recreation and not self-defense. This association is likely to have changed in the meantime.

In most other Western societies, safeguarding the security of citizens is exclusively the responsibility of law enforcement and of the criminal justice system. There is evidence that—at least in Europe—citizens are reasonably satisfied with this division of responsibilities. According to a survey conducted among membership states of the European Union (Eurostat, 2018), 75% of respondents reported that they felt either very or fairly safe when walking at night in their neighborhood. At 83% in Switzerland, the rate was even higher, and the police was the most trusted public institution (Swiss Info, 2018). In a study of U.S. handgun owners, Kreienkamp et al. (2021) therefore added “trust in law enforcement” (e.g., “Do you trust the police to generally protect you and your family against acts of violence?”) as additional predictor in a second test of the model of defensive gun ownership (see also Giles et al., this issue). They also added a measure of self-reported news exposure frequency, because the discrepancy between people’s perception of crime in their neighborhood and national crime suggested that people’s estimate of crime levels was mainly based on news sources rather than personal experience or information from neighborhood sources. Finally, they combined protection/self-defense as a major reason for owning a gun with the three beliefs related to the appropriateness of assertive gun use: justification to shoot a suspected home intruder; the right to kill to defend oneself, one’s family, or one’s property; vigilantism in service to community protection, and gun carry habits (see also Pinto & Marques, this issue); these beliefs were sufficiently intercorrelated to form a latent variable “defensive gun ownership” (Kreienkamp et al., 2021).

Based on the model of defensive gun ownership, they predicted that both the associations between “trust in law enforcement” and “news exposure” with “defensive gun ownership” should be fully mediated by BDW and PLRA. Consistent with this prediction, they found negative paths between “trust” and both BDW and PLRA: the greater respondents’ trust in law enforcement, the lower their BDW and their PLRA. There were also positive paths between “news exposure” and both BDW and PLRA. Consistent with their expectation that people’s information about crime was based on information gained from the news, the more people were exposed to news reports in newspapers or on radio/TV, the higher they rated their perceived lifetime risk of assault as well as their belief in a dangerous world. These results remained stable when controlling for state-level crime rates.

Who Are These Dangerous People Feared by High Scorers on BDW?

When trying to identify the “outgroup” of “dangerous people” referred to in the BDW, it is useful to also consider the relevant characteristics of the imagined “ingroup,” which are ostensibly other gun owners and the members of the community that they believe warrant their protection. Although the demographics of gun owners are changing, at the present time, twice as many men (43%) as women (22%) own a gun (Brenan, 2022). The majority of gun owners are also politically conservative: According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, 44% of gun owners are Republican or Republican leaning, and only 20% Democrats or Democrat leaning (Schaeffer, 2021). Finally, there is evidence that gun ownership is associated with racial prejudice (Filindra et al., 2021; O’Brien et al., 2013). For example, in a study based on data from the 2008–2009 American National Election Study (ANES), O’Brien et al. (2013) found significant associations between gun ownership and both conservative political orientation and symbolic racism—a modern strain of anti-Black prejudice that involves “negative feelings toward blacks as a group combined with a sense that blacks violate cherished American values” (Sears & Henry, 2003, p. 254). Even when controlling for political orientation, each 1-point increase in symbolic racism predicted a 50% increase in the odds of having a gun in the home. This indicates that gun ownership is quite strongly associated with racism.

Another study of the association between racial prejudice and gun ownership by Filindra et al. (2021) also used data from several ANES conducted between 2004 and 2016, and from the 2015 Gun Survey of YouGov.org. (Moore, 2015). Based on both data sets, they found that racial resentment was strongly and positively associated with both gun ownership and number of guns owned. The Gun Survey also assessed reasons for owning a gun, and one of the major reasons was protection from crime. Racial resentment was also strongly and positively associated with need for security. Thus, White Americans who are prejudiced towards Blacks are not only likely to own several guns, but they are also likely to own their guns for self-defense.

There is also evidence that individuals who score high on BDW are particularly concerned about groups that are stereotypically perceived as threatening. In a study by Cook et al. (2018), participants were presented with two categories of groups, namely groups that were stereotypically associated with safety threats for (prejudiced) Americans (e.g., Muslims, illegal immigrants)³ and groups also stereotyped but generally considered safe (e.g., bisexuals, individuals with obesity). In addition to responding to the BDW, participants were asked whether members of these groups threatened their physical safety and how afraid they were of them. They found that illegal immigrants and Muslims were perceived as the greatest safety threat and aroused the most fear. Importantly, there was an interaction with BDW, with respondents with high BDW scores perceiving Muslims and illegal immigrants, but not individuals with obesity or bisexuals, as a greater safety threat and more fear-arousing than did low-BDW respondents.

Cook et al. (2018) also conducted an experiment in which they tested whether a manipulation of the perception of safety threat would increase prejudice in high-BDW participants towards individuals perceived as dangerous (Mexican American men), but not towards individuals not considered a danger (Asian men). Participants were presented with one of two fake newspaper articles. In the experimental (threat) condition, the article described how poor economic conditions had led to higher crime rates in the US. In the control condition, poor economic conditions were alleged to have resulted in higher sales of movie tickets. The dependent measure assessed participants’ feelings of fear and distrust of Mexican American and Asian men. There was a main effect of BDW, with high scorers reporting more fear and distrust of Mexican American men, while condition had no effect. This main effect was moderated by an interaction of BDW and threat condition on distrust of Mexican American men, with BDW predicting distrust only in the safety threat condition but not in the condition without safety threat. Neither BDW nor condition predicted mistrust of Asian American men. There was also no interaction between BDW and condition on mistrust of Asian men. Thus, individuals who perceive the world as a dangerous place (high BDW) feel more threatened than low-BDW individuals by ethnic groups that are stereotypically seen as dangerous in American society. Given the positive association between BDW and gun ownership (Stroebe et al., 2017), the threat perceived as emanating from these ethnic groups might be one of the reasons why high-BDW individuals feel the need to own a gun.

How to Explain the Recent Increase in Americans’ Need of Guns for Self-Defense?

To account for the increase in need of a gun for self-defense that occurred during the last 2 decades, in terms of the psychological model of defensive gun ownership of Stroebe et al. (2017), one must identify societal conditions that are likely to have increased people’s belief in a dangerous world and/or their perceived lifetime risk of assault during this period of time. In the following, we will discuss three societal changes that could potentially have been responsible.

Prejudice and the Great Replacement

Because the need of a gun for self-defense is at least partly determined by people’s belief in a dangerous world, and because these beliefs appear to be associated with racial prejudice, we must identify conditions that may have raised the level of prejudice towards racial minority groups among White Americans. A psychological experiment observed that merely informing British and Italian Whites that their majority status in their respective countries was threatened by immigrants, sufficed to increase both concern about their national culture and anti-immigrant prejudice (Shepherd et al., 2018). Analogously, the share of the (non-Hispanic) White people of the U.S. population will fall below 50% around 2045 (Frey, 2023). According to social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979), people compare their own group with other groups and seek to gain a positive social identity by positively differentiating themselves from the other groups. Being the majority culture is likely to have helped White Americans to differentiate themselves positively from other racial groups. The fact that this position is now being challenged is likely to increase intergroup prejudice (Craig & Richeson, 2014; Rios, this issue).

In the US, however, social norms may prevent direct expressions of racial/ethnic prejudice and discrimination; even in psychological research, prejudice is often assessed indirectly, such as via symbolic racism scales that examine so-called “dog whistles” that communicate prejudice (Sears & Henry, 2003). Hence, prejudice is often sublimated or channeled through normative channels—potentially explaining people’s attraction to conspiracy theories about racial/ethnic outgroups operating in a unified and purposive manner in service to a sinister plan (Douglas et al., 2019; Sternisko et al., 2020; see also van Prooien, this issue). It is therefore not surprising that, according to research by The New York Times, the replacement theory, a fringe conspiracy theory that used to be espoused only by the extreme White nationalist Right, has become popular among some American conservatives (Confessore & Yourish, 2022). It was originally disseminated by the French author Renaud Camus in 2010 and 2011, at a time when Europe experienced several Islamist terrorist attacks. Camus suggested that with the complicity of some unnamed elites, the ethnic French and White European population of France were being demographically and culturally replaced by non-White people through mass migration, demographic growth, and a drop in the birth rate of White Europeans (“Renaud Camus,” 2023). The U.S. version of the replacement theory became notorious through a right-wing rally in Charlotteville, Virginia in 2017, when the marchers chanted “The Jews will not replace us,” and a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi drove his car into a crowd of antiracist protesters, killing one person and injuring 35 (Wamsey & Allyn, 2019).

A replacement theory ideology appears also to have motivated the mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh (2018), the El Paso Walmart mass shooting (2019), as well as the Buffalo mass shooting (2022), wherein the gunmen posted their anti-Semitic, anti-Hispanic, and anti-Black sentiments online prior to the attacks.⁴ Psychological surveys conducted in the wakes of the Pittsburgh and El Paso mass shootings indicated some level of sublimated prejudice against the victims among American Whites, who reported a sense of collective disempowerment in society. Disempowered Whites reported stronger support for White nationalism and higher prejudice against the victim groups (anti-Semitism and anti-Hispanic prejudice), yet also downplayed that the shootings were motivated by hatred or prejudice (a potential indicator of hate crime denial; Leander et al., 2020). The authors theorized that, consistent with theories of competitive victimhood (Noor et al., 2012) and social norms against prejudice, acknowledging a hate crime would necessitate the granting of special “victimhood” status in society that would entitle the victim group to societal compensation and respect—which disempowered Whites may be seeking themselves (cf. Leander et al., 2020). Results are consistent with the idea that there is some degree of sympathy for White supremacist shootings among members of the U.S. public who are concerned about the perceived decline of their ingroup.

One of the most influential promoters of this version of the replacement theory has been Tucker Carlson in his extremely popular, but now cancelled, show on Fox Television (Confessore & Yourish, 2022). By 2022, roughly 1 in 3 Americans (32%) agreed that a group of people is trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gain (Snow, 2022). A similar share (29%) is also concerned that such an increase will result in the loss of cultural and economic influence by native-born Americans. Such beliefs are more frequently held by individuals who watch right-wing media outlets (e.g., Fox News, One America News Network, Newsmax) rather than CNN or MSNBC. Although Republicans (36%) are most likely to share such beliefs, there are also quite a few Democrats (27%) and independents (21%) who tend to agree.

Even though there is no causal evidence that symbolic prejudice and racially tinged conspiracy theories cause an increase in gun ownership, racial and ethnic group identity and intergroup threat are associated with gun ownership (Filindra & Kaplan, 2015; O’Brien et al., 2013). For example, rates of gun ownership in Southern U.S. states tend to correlate reliably with historical prevalence of slavery (Buttrick & Mazen, 2022). That is, historically greater prevalence of slavery, at the county level, was associated with greater rates of current gun ownership in the same county.

Whether guns represent means of protection may depend on who has the gun—it can easily be seen as a threat to safety in the hands of a vilified outgroup; even support for Second Amendment gun rights is contingent on who is exercising a given gun right. Recent experiments showed that Whites who held symbolic racial resentments—expressed in terms of normative racial tropes (e.g., that racial inequities are due to Black Americans not working hard enough)—were less likely to support the right to concealed carry when they were experimentally led to believe that Blacks were more likely to exercise the right than Whites (Higginbotham et al., 2023). The authors theorized that guns are associated with power in the US (see also Leander et al., 2019; Mencken & Froese, 2019), and hence support for Second Amendment rights may depend on whether the perceiver agrees that the group deserves to wield such power. By extension of the same reasoning, guns may represent means for an ingroup to defend against the perceived threats of groups with rising status and power in society.

The possibility that an uncontrolled number of non-White immigrants would enter the US in the coming years can thus be perceived as threatening by racially prejudiced Americans and increase defensive gun ownership. Thus, the increased popularity of the replacement theory in the US may correspond with an increase in the perceived need for self-defense as reason for purchasing guns. However, given that only 30% of Americans appear to believe in the replacement theory, there must have been other factors that contributed to an increased need of guns for self-defense, and one of these factors has been the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 Pandemic

During the first year of COVID-19, in the period between March 1, 2020 and March 31, 2021, gun violence in the US increased by 30% compared to the same period during the previous year (e.g., Ssentongo et al., 2021). At the same time, there was also a sudden increase in firearm sales, with 2 million firearms being purchased in March 2020, many of those by first-time buyers (Anestis et al., 2023). Given that the need to defend oneself has been a main motivator of firearm purchasing, it seems likely that the combination of a pandemic and the associated increase in gun violence persuaded many of these first-time buyers that they needed a firearm for self-defense.

Support for this assumption comes from a study that compared first-time buyers during the pandemic to buyers who already owned firearms, and to nonowners with regard to threat sensitivity (Anestis et al., 2023). Compared to established gun owners who purchased additional guns, first-time buyers scored significantly higher on a measure of threat sensitivity. Threat sensitivity was assessed with the Negative Cognitions About the World Subscale of the brief Posttraumatic Cognitions Inventory (Wells et al., 2019). This scale assesses the extent to which individuals perceive others as untrustworthy and unreliable. The three items used are: “People can’t be trusted,” “I can’t rely on other people,” and “People are not what they seem”. Like BDW, it reflects a diffuse perception of social threat, and it predicted owning a gun for self-protection and differentiated such gun owners from those who indicated other reasons for gun ownership (Bryan et al., 2020).

The social-psychological threats emanating from the pandemic circumstance were also multifaceted: Beyond any perceived threat of infection, perceived threats to one’s economic circumstances predicted the prioritization of personal agency, resource competition, and anti-Asian prejudice (Dhanani & Franz, 2021; Lemay et al., 2021). The national lockdowns not only frustrated people’s life goals and daily routines (Han et al., 2023), but this period corresponded with increased domestic violence, xenophobia, and hate crimes (Gover et al., 2020; He et al., 2021). Indeed, in Western countries like the US, the severity and duration of the lockdowns predicted greater prejudice against immigrants, including the perceived symbolic threat they pose (Han et al., 2023). Hence, the pandemic circumstances probably created situations conducive to psychological threat, frustration, and aggression-related coping. Meanwhile, in the US, the perception of guns as a source of safety explained the most variance in pandemic-era gun purchase interest (Kerner et al., 2022). A pandemic might explain perceptions of physical or psychological threat, but it does not explain why Americans perceived guns as an effective means of self-defense against such threats.

Gun Advertising

A third factor that may explain Americans’ need of guns for self-defense is a recent change in the way guns are advertised by the American gun industry. In recent decades, gun advertising shifted away from recreational gun ownership to an emphasis on self-defense (Yamane et al., 2020). Yamane and colleagues analyzed gun advertisements in single randomly selected issues of Guns, the second oldest general U.S. gun magazine that has been published continuously since 1955. They reported that hunting and sport shooting as a theme in gun advertisement increased through the 1960s, but then began to decline, reaching zero in 2018. A similar trend is observed for sport and recreational shooting. In contrast, the proportion of personal protection/self-defense advertisements showed a steady increase from near zero in 1955, with the cross-over point occurring around 2010–2011. Yamane and colleagues acknowledge that self-defense has always been part of the American gun culture, but also that it has not been very dominant (e.g., there have been occasional advertisements praising “pocket pistols” as means of self-defense). Only recently has self-defense become the dominant theme in firearm advertising.

Another study of firearm advertising confirmed that as recently as 2002, self-defense had not been an important theme of gun advertising (Saylor et al., 2004). These researchers analyzed firearm advertisements in the most recent issue for the year 2002 of 27 gun magazines. They estimated that 63 manufacturers spent $1,195,680 on firearm advertising in 1 month. They reported that the most common theme in these 2002 issues were positive descriptions of attributes of the advertised guns (96.5%). A distant second was hunting/outdoors (20.4%). Self-protection was hardly mentioned (2.7%). Although this percentage is somewhat lower than the percentage of self-defense/concealed carrying themes identified for that period by Yamane et al., the findings of both studies indicate that self-defense was not a major theme emphasized in gun advertisements at the turn of the century.

It is interesting to speculate about the extent to which this change in gun advertising contributed to the increase in people’s perception that they needed a gun for self-defense. In view of the other factors that are likely to have contributed to this increase, we suspect that rather than being the main driver of this trend, the gun industry sensed that change in gun ownership motivation and adjusted their advertising accordingly. There is also an alternative explanation why the steep incline in reports that one needed a gun for self-defense happened at a time when the gun industry increasingly advertised self-defense as a reason for owning a gun. Reporting that one needs a gun to protect one’s family fits very well with a self-image of the “man as the protector,” and is much more acceptable than admitting that owning a gun makes one feel powerful and manly. Perhaps the most vivid evidence of marketing guns as means to masculinity comes from the $73 million settlement between the families of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims and Remington Arms—makers of the military-style AR-15 semiautomatic rifle that has come to symbolize American mass shootings (Frankel et al., 2023). The plaintiffs argued that Remington targeted their ads to lonely young men—as the gunman—with ads that highlighted the role of their products for asserting masculinity and power. The ads used slogans such as “Consider your man card reissued,” “Forces of opposition, bow down”; another read “Clear the room” and was printed in red-spattered letters. Accordingly, marketing research into overcompensation indicates that men react to threats or losses to their masculinity through extreme displays of compensatory consumption—including the purchase of firearms (Witkowski, 2020).

How many guns does one need to defend oneself and what type of gun would one choose to do so? Do people need a military-style semiautomatic (AR-15 type) rifle for this purpose? Would a handgun not be more convenient? It seems plausible to assume that one gun would fulfill these defense needs and that the weapon of choice would be a handgun. Surprisingly, though, only 32% of gun owners own a single gun, and 72% of those own a handgun. In contrast, 37% of gun owners own two to four guns, and 29% own five or more guns (Parker et al., 2017). Such questions become moot if we stop assuming gun ownership is only about protection and self-defense, but also consider that guns are symbols of social power and provide psychological empowerment (Leander et al., 2019). This raises the possibility that the main effect of recent gun advertising is to provide gun owners with a normative justification for owning their guns—and perhaps to conceal other social motives that may drive gun ownership that would be inappropriate to acknowledge or admit.

Conclusions

In other industrialized Western countries, safeguarding the security of citizens is exclusively the responsibility of law enforcement and of the criminal justice system. In this article, we addressed two questions: (a) why do Americans think they need a gun to defend themselves and their families? and (b) why has the number of Americans who share this belief increased so dramatically in recent decades, despite a decrease in rates of violent crime? To address the first question, we described the model of defensive gun ownership of Stroebe et al. (2017), which assumes that Americans’ need of a gun for self-defense is not only determined by their fear of crime (PLRA), but also by some diffuse fear, their belief that the world is a dangerous place and that there are bad people who might attack them (BDW). We described two studies that supported our model.

We then attempted to identify the dangerous people feared by gun owners who score high on BDW. We reviewed evidence that gun ownership is associated with racial prejudice and that individuals who score high on BDW are particularly concerned about groups that are stereotypically associated with safety threats. We therefore concluded that it was Black Americans as well as illegal immigrants who form the majority of the “dangerous” people feared by individuals that score high on BDW.

In our explanation of the recent increase in Americans’ need of guns for self-defense, we identified three environmental changes that might have increased gun owners’ belief in a dangerous world and/or their perceived lifetime risk of assault, namely the increase in popularity of the great replacement theory, the COVID pandemic, and a change in the way the American gun industry advertises its products. The emphasis on the threat that native-born White Americans might be replaced by immigrants who are people of color, the health threat by a new and previously unknown virus (COVID-19), and the change in the message with which the American gun industry advertises its products might have induced Americans who did not yet own a gun to go out and purchase one. It remains an open question, however, whether the gun industry was involved in starting this bandwagon, or whether they only jumped on it once they realized it was an ongoing concern.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Wolfgang Stroebe

Notes

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Why Americans increasingly claim to own guns for self-protection: A modern culture of social-psychological threat defense

Abstract

Keywords

A Model of the Motivational Bases of American Gun Ownership

Testing the Model of Defensive Gun Ownership

Who Are These Dangerous People Feared by High Scorers on BDW?

How to Explain the Recent Increase in Americans’ Need of Guns for Self-Defense?

Prejudice and the Great Replacement

The COVID-19 Pandemic

Gun Advertising

Conclusions

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

References