How Easy is It to Buy a Gun Journal

Abstract

The gun debate in America is often framed as a stand up-off betwixt two immutable positions with little potential to movement alee with meaningful legislative reform. Attempts to resolve this impasse accept been thwarted by thinking well-nigh gun ownership attitudes as based on rational choice economics instead of considering the broader socio-cultural meanings of guns. In this essay, an additional psychological perspective is offered that highlights how concerns near victimization and mass shootings within a shared civilisation of fear can bulldoze cerebral bias and motivated reasoning on both sides of the gun argue. Despite common fears, differences in attitudes and feelings nearly guns themselves manifest in variable degrees of support for or opposition to gun control legislation that are oft exaggerated within caricatured depictions of polarization. A psychological perspective suggests that consensus on gun legislation reform can be achieved through understanding differences and multifariousness on both sides of the argue, working inside a mutual eye ground, and more enquiry to resolve ambiguities about how best to minimize fear while maximizing personal and public safe.

Discounting risk

Do guns kill people or practise people kill people? Answers to that riddle draw a bright line betwixt two sides of a caricatured contend near guns in polarized America. One side believes that guns are a menace to public safety, while the other believes that they are an essential tool of self-preservation. Ane side cannot fathom why more than gun command legislation has not been passed in the wake of a disturbing rise in mass shootings in the US and eyes Commonwealth of australia's 1996 sweeping gun reform and New Zealand'south more than recent restrictions with envy. The other, backed past the Constitutional correct to bear artillery and the powerful lobby of the National Burglarize Clan (NRA), fears the glace slope of legislative change and refuses to yield an inch while threatening, "I'll give y'all my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands". With the nation at an impasse, meaningful federal gun legislation aimed at reducing firearm violence remains elusive.

Despite the 1996 Dickey Subpoena'southward restriction of federal funding for research on gun violence by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Rostron, 2018), more than xxx years of public health inquiry supports thinking of guns equally statistically more than of a personal hazard than a do good. Case-command studies have repeatedly constitute that gun ownership is associated with an increased take a chance of gun-related homicide or suicide occurring in the home (Kellermann and Reay, 1986; Kellermann et al., 1993; Cummings and Koepsell, 1998; Wiebe, 2003; Dahlberg et al., 2004; Hemenway, 2011; Anglemeyer et al., 2014). For homicides, the association is largely driven by gun-related violence committed by family members and other acquaintances, not strangers (Kellermann et al., 1993, 1998; Wiebe, 2003).

If having a gun increases the risk of gun-related violent death in the domicile, why do people choose to own guns? To date, the prevailing answer from the public wellness literature has been seemingly based on a knowledge deficit model that assumes that gun owners are unaware of risks and that repeated warnings about "overwhelming evidence" of "the health run a risk of a gun in the home [being] greater than the benefit" (Hemenway, 2011) should therefore decrease gun ownership and increase back up for gun legislation reform. And nonetheless, the rate of U.s. households with guns has held steady for ii decades (Smith and Son, 2015) with owners amassing an increasing number of guns such that the full civilian stock has risen to some 265 one thousand thousand firearms (Azrael et al., 2017). This disparity suggests that the knowledge deficit model is inadequate to explain or change gun ownership.

In contrast to the premise that people counterbalance the risks and benefits of their beliefs based on "rational selection economics" (Kahan and Braman, 2003), nigh fifty years of psychology and behavioral economics enquiry has instead painted a flick of man determination-making as a less than rational procedure based on cognitive curt-cuts ("availability heuristics") and other error-prone cognitive biases (Tversky and Kahneman, 1974; Kunda, 1990; Haselton and Nettle, 2006; Hibert, 2012). As a issue, "consequentialist" approaches to promoting healthier choices are often ineffective. Post-obit this perspective, recent public health efforts have moved across educational campaigns to apply an agreement of the psychology of risky behavior to strike a residuum between regulation and behavioral "nudges" aimed at reducing harmful practices like smoking, unhealthy eating, texting while driving, and vaccine refusal (Atchley et al., 2011; Hansen et al., 2016; Matjasko et al., 2016; Pluviano et al., 2017).

A similar public wellness approach aimed at reducing gun violence should take into account how gun owners discount the risks of buying co-ordinate to cognitive biases and motivated reasoning. For example, cognitive racket may lead those who already own guns to turn a blind centre to research findings almost the dangers of ownership. Optimism bias, the general trend of individuals to overestimate good outcomes and underestimate bad outcomes, tin likewise make it easy to disregard dangers past externalizing them to others. The risk of suicide can therefore be dismissed out of hand based on the rationale that "it will never happen to me," while the risk of homicide can exist discounted based on demographic factors. Kleck and Gertz (1998) noted that membership in street gangs and drug dealing might be important confounds of risk in case control studies, just as unsafe storage practices such as keeping a firearm loaded and unlocked may be some other (Kellerman et al., 1993). Other studies have institute that the homicide risk associated with guns in the home is greater for women compared to men and for non-whites compared to whites (Wiebe, 2003). Consequently, white men—by far the largest demographic that owns guns—might be particularly likely to remember of themselves as immune to the risks of gun ownership and, through confirmation bias, ruddy-pick the data to back up pre-existing intuitions and fuel motivated disbelief almost guns. These testable hypotheses warrant examination in future enquiry aimed at agreement the psychology of gun ownership and crafting public wellness approaches to curbing gun violence.

However, while the part of cognitive biases should be integrated into a psychological agreement of attitudes towards gun ownership, cognitive biases are universal liabilities that fall brusque of explaining why some people might "use" them equally a part of motivated reasoning to support buying or to oppose gun reform. To sympathise the underlying motivation that drives cognitive bias, a deeper analysis of why people own guns is required. In the introductory essay to this journal's series on "What Guns Mean," Metzl (2019) noted that public health efforts to reduce firearm ownership accept failed to "address beliefs about guns among people who own them". In a follow-upwardly piece, Galea and Abdalla (2019) likewise suggested that the gun debate is complicated by the fact that "knowledge and values exercise not align" and that "these values create an impasse, one where knowing is not plenty" (Galea and Abdalla, 2019). Indeed, these and other authors (Kahan and Braman, 2003; Braman and Kahan, 2006; Pierre, 2015; Kalesan et al., 2016) have enumerated myriad behavior and values, related to the different "symbolic lives" and "social meanings" of firearms both inside and outside of "gun culture" that drive polarized attitudes towards gun ownership in the United states. This essay attempts to farther explore the significant of guns from a psychological perspective.

Fearfulness and gun ownership

Modernistic psychological understanding of human being conclusion-making has moved beyond availability heuristics and cognitive biases to integrate the office of emotion and affect. Several related models including the "risk-every bit-feelings hypothesis" (Loewenstein et al., 2001), the "affect heuristic" (Slovic et al., 2007); and the "appraisal-tendency framework" (Lerner et al., 2015) illustrate how emotions tin can hijack rational-controlling processes to the betoken of being the ascendant influence on risk assessments. Research has shown that "perceived hazard judgments"—estimates of the likelihood that something bad will happen—are peculiarly hampered by emotion (Pachur et al., 2012) and that different types of touch on can bias such judgments in different ways (Lerner et al., 2015). For example, fear tin can in particular bias assessments away from rational analysis to overestimate risks, too as to perceive negative events equally unpredictable (Lerner et al., 2015).

Although gun ownership is associated with positive feelings almost firearms within "gun civilisation" (Pierre, 2015; Kalesan et al., 2016; Metzl, 2019), about enquiry comparing gun owners to non-gun owners suggests that ownership is rooted in fear. While long guns accept historically been owned primarily for hunting and other recreational purposes, US surveys dating back to the 1990s take revealed that the most frequent reason for gun ownership and more specifically handgun ownership is cocky-protection (Cook and Ludwig, 1997; Azrael et al., 2017; Pew Enquiry Heart, 2017). Enquiry has likewise shown that the conclusion to obtain a firearm is largely motivated by past victimization and/or fears of hereafter victimization (Kleck et al., 2011; Hauser and Kleck, 2013).

A few studies take reported that handgun buying is associated with past victimization, perceived risk of crime, and perceived ineffectiveness of police force protection within low-income communities where these concerns may exist coinciding with real risks (Vacha and McLaughlin, 2000, 2004). However, gun ownership tends to be lower in urban settings and in depression-income families where there might be college rates of violence and criminal offense (Vacha and McLaughlin, 2000). Instead, the largest demographic of gun owners in the The states are white men living in rural communities who are earning more than $100K/twelvemonth (Azrael et al., 2017). Mencken and Froese (2019) too reported that gun owners tend to have college incomes and greater ratings of life happiness than non-owners. These findings suggest a mismatch between subjective fear and objective reality.

Stroebe and colleagues (2017) reported that the specific perceived chance of victimization and more "diffuse" fears that the earth is a dangerous place are both independent predictors of handgun ownership, with perceived risk of assault associated with having been or knowing a victim of violent crime and belief in a unsafe world associated with political conservatism. These findings hint at the likelihood that perceived risk of victimization can be based on vicarious sources with a potential for bias, whether through actual known acquaintances or watching the nightly news, conducting a Google search or scanning one's social media feed, or reading "The Armed Denizen" column in the NRA newsletter The American Rifleman. It as well suggests that a general fright of crime, independent of actual or even perceived individual risk, may be a powerful motivator for gun ownership for some that might track with race and political ideology.

Several authors have drawn a connection between gun ownership and racial tensions by examining the cultural symbolism and socio-political meaning of guns. Bhatia (2019) detailed how the NRA'southward "disinformation entrada reliant on fearmongering" is synthetic around a narrative of "fright and identity politics" that exploits electric current xenophobic sentiments related to immigrants. Metzl (2019) noted that during the 1960s, conservatives were uncharacteristically in favor of gun control when armed resistance was promoted by Malcolm Ten, the Black Panther Political party, and others involved in the Blackness Power Movement. Today, Metzl argues, "mainstream order reflexively codes white men carrying weapons in public equally patriots, while marker armed black men as threats or criminals." In support of this view, a 2013 written report found that having a gun in the home was significantly associated with racism against black people as measured past the Symbolic Racism Scale, noting that "for each 1 point increase in symbolic racism, at that place was a l% greater odds of having a gun in the habitation and a 28% increase in the odds of supporting permits to carry concealed handguns" (O'Brien et al., 2013). Hypothesizing that guns are a symbol of hegemonic masculinity that serves to "shore up white male privilege in society," Stroud (2012) interviewed a non-random sample of 20 predominantly white men in Texas who had licenses for curtained handgun carry. The men described how guns assistance to fulfill their identities every bit protectors of their families, while characterizing imagined dangers with rhetoric suggesting specific fears about black criminals. These findings propose that gun ownership among white men may exist related to a collective identity as "good guys" protecting themselves confronting "bad guys" who are people of color, a premise echoed in the lay printing with headlines like, "Why Are White Men Stockpiling Guns?" (Smith, 2018), "Report: White Men Stockpile Guns Because They're Agape of Black People" (Harriott, 2018), and "Gun Rights Are Near Keeping White Men on Superlative" (Wuertenberg, 2018).

Connecting the dots, the available evidence therefore suggests that for many gun owners, fears about victimization can upshot in confirmation, myside, and optimism biases that not only discount the risks of ownership, but besides drag the salience of perceived do good, yet remote, every bit information technology does when one buys a lottery ticket (Rogers and Webley, 2001). Indeed, amongst gun owners there is widespread conventionalities that having a gun makes 1 safer, supported by published claims that where there are "more guns", at that place is "less offense" (Lott, 1998, 1999) as well every bit statistics and anecdotes about successful defensive gun use (DGU) (Kleck and Gertz, 1995, 1998; Tark and Kleck, 2004; Cramer and Burnett, 2012). Suffice it to say that there have been numerous debates most how to best interpret this torso of show, with critics claiming that "more guns, less criminal offence" is a myth (Ayres and Donohue, 2003; Moyer, 2017) that has been "discredited" (Wintemute, 2008) and that the incidence of DGU has been grossly overestimated and pales in comparison to the risk of being threatened or harmed by a gun in the home (Hemenway, 1997, 2011; Cook and Ludwig, 1998; Azrael and Hemenway, 2000; Hemenway et al., 2000). Attempts at objective assay accept concluded that surveys to date have defined and measured DGU inconsistently with unclear numbers of simulated positives and imitation negatives (Smith, 1997; McDowall et al., 2000; National Research Quango, 2005; RAND, 2018), that the causal furnishings of DGU on reducing injury are "inconclusive" (RAND, 2018), and that "neither side seems to be willing to requite ground or run across their opponent's indicate of view" (Smith, 1997). With the scientific contend almost DGU mirrored in the lay press (Defilippis and Hughes, 2015; Kleck, 2015; Doherty, 2015), a rational assessment of whether guns brand owners safer is hampered by a lack of "settled science". With no apparent consensus, motivated reasoning can pave the way to the nullification of opposing arguments in favor of personal opinions and ideological stances.

For gun owners, fifty-fifty if information technology is acknowledged that on average successful DGU is much less probable than a homicide or suicide in the home, non having a gun at all translates to zero take chances of self-preservation, which are intolerable odds. The lesser line is that when gun owners believe that owning a gun volition brand them experience safer, little else may matter. Curiously however, there is conflicting evidence that gun buying actually decreases fears of victimization (Hauser and Kleck, 2013; Dowd-Arrow et al., 2019). That gun ownership may not mitigate such fears could help to account for why some individuals go on to acquire multiple guns beyond their initial purchase with US gun owners possessing an average of five firearms and 8% of owners having 10 or more (Azrael et al., 2017).

Gun owner diversity

A psychological model of the polarized gun argue in America would ideally compare those for or against gun control legislation. Still, research to date has instead focused mainly on differences between gun owners and non-gun owners, which has several limitations. For example, of the nearly 70% of Americans who do not own a gun, 36% report that they tin can come across themselves owning one in the future (Pew Research Center, 2017) with 11.five% of all gun owners in 2015 having newly caused one in the previous five years (Wertz et al., 2018). Gun ownership and not-ownership are therefore dynamic states that may non reflect static ideology. Personal accounts such every bit Willis' (2010) article, "I Was Anti-gun, Until I Got Stalked," illustrate this point well.

With existing research heavily reliant on comparing gun owners to non-gun owners, a psychological model of gun attitudes in the Us will have limited utility if it relies solely on gun owner stereotypes based on their most frequent demographic characteristics. On the contrary, Hauser and Kleck (2013) accept argued that "a more complete understanding of the human relationship between fright of crime and gun buying at the individual level is crucial". Simply and then, looking more closely at the diversity of gun owners can reveal important details beyond the kinds of stereotypes that are ofttimes used to frame political debates.

Foremost, it must be recognized that not all gun owners are conservative white men with racist attitudes. Over the past several decades, women have comprised 9–14% of United states of america gun owners with the "gender gap" narrowing due to decreasing male buying (Smith and Son, 2015). A 2017 Pew Survey reported that 22% of women in the Us own a gun and that female person gun owners are just as probable every bit men to vest to the NRA (Pew Research Center, 2017). Although the 36% rate of gun ownership among US whites is the highest for any racial demographic, 25% of blacks and 15% of Hispanics report owning guns with these racial groups being significantly more concerned than whites about gun violence in their communities and the United states every bit a whole (Pew Research Heart, 2017). Providing a hit counterpoint to Stroud's (2012) interviews of white gun owners in Texas, Craven (2017) interviewed xi blackness gun owners across the state who offered various views on guns and the question of whether owning them makes them feel safer, including if confronted by police during a traffic stop. Kelly (2019) has similarly offered a self-portrait as a female "left-fly anarchist" against the stereotype of guns owners as "Republicans, racist libertarians, and other by and large Constitution-obsessed weirdos". She reminds usa that, "there is also a long history of armed community self-defense force among the radical left that is often glossed over or forgotten entirely in favor of the Fob News-friendly narrative that all liberals hate guns… when the cops and other fascists run across that they're not the only ones packing, the balance of ability shifts, and they tend to reconsider their tactics".

Although Mencken and Froese (2019) concluded that "white men in economic distress find comfort in guns as a means to reestablish a sense of individual power and moral certitude," their study results actually demonstrated that gun owners fall into distinguishable groups based on unlike levels of "moral and emotional empowerment" imparted by guns. For example, those with depression levels of gun empowerment were more probable to exist female and to ain long guns for recreational purposes such equally hunting and collecting. Other research has shown that the motivations to ain a gun, and the caste to which gun ownership is related to fear and the desire for self-protection, also varies according to the blazon of gun (Stroebe et al., 2017). Owning guns, owning specific types of guns (eastward.g. handguns, long guns, and and so-called "military style" semi-automatic rifles similar AR-15s), carrying a gun in public, and keeping a loaded gun on i's nightstand all have dissimilar psychological implications. A 2015 study reported that new gun owners were younger and more likely to identify as liberal than long-continuing gun owners (Wertz et al., 2018). Although Kalesan et al. (2016) establish that gun buying is more likely amidst those living within a "gun civilisation" where buying is prevalent, encouraged, and part of social life, it would therefore be a error to characterize gun civilisation as a monolith.

It would too be a error to equate gun buying with opposition to gun legislation reform or vice-versa. Although some evidence supports a stiff association (Wolpert and Gimpel, 1998), more than recent studies suggest of import exceptions to the rule. While only most thirty% of the US population owns a gun, over lxx% believes that nearly citizens should be able to legally ain them (Pew Research Center, 2017). Women tend to exist more likely than men to support gun control, fifty-fifty when they are gun owners themselves (Kahan and Braman, 2003; Mencken and Froese, 2019). Older (age seventy–79) Americans likewise have some of the highest rates of gun buying, merely also the highest rates of back up for gun control (Pederson et al., 2015). In Mencken and Froese's study (2019), virtually gun owners reporting lower levels of gun empowerment favored bans on semi-automatic weapons and loftier-capacity magazines and opposed arming teachers in schools. Kahan and Braman (2003) theorized that attitudes towards gun control are best understood according to a "cultural theory of run a risk". In their study sample, those with "hierarchical" and "individualist" cultural orientations were more likely than those with "egalitarian" views to oppose gun control and these perspectives were more than predictive than other variables including political affiliation and fear of crime.

In fact, both gun owners and non-owners study loftier degrees of support for universal background checks; laws mandating safety gun storage in households with children; and "red flag" laws restricting admission to firearms for those hospitalized for mental affliction or those otherwise at risk of harming themselves or others, those convicted of sure crimes including public display of a gun in a threatening manner, those discipline to temporary domestic violence restraining orders, and those on "no-fly" or other watch lists (Pew Research Center, 2017; Barry et al., 2018). According to a 2015 survey, the majority of the Us public also opposes carrying firearms in public spaces with nearly gun owners opposing public carry in schools, higher campuses, places of worship, bars, and sports stadiums (Wolfson et al., 2017). Despite broad public back up for gun legislation reform even so, it is important to recognize that the threat of gun restrictions is an important commuter of gun acquisition (Wallace, 2015; Aisch and Keller, 2016). As a result, proposals to restrict gun ownership boosted gun sales considerably nether the Obama assistants (Depetris-Chauvin, 2015), whereas gun companies like Remington and United Sporting Companies take since filed for bankruptcy nether the Trump administration.

A shared culture of fear

Developing a psychological agreement of attitudes towards guns and gun control legislation in the U.s.a. that accounts for underlying emotions, motivated reasoning, and individual variation must avert the easy trap of pathologizing gun owners and dismissing their fears as irrational. Instead, information technology should consider the likelihood that motivated reasoning underlies opinion on both sides of the gun argue, with good reason to conclude that fearfulness is a prominent source of both "pro-gun" and "anti-gun" attitudes. Although the research on fear and gun ownership summarized above implies that non-gun owners are unconcerned nearly victimization, a closer look at private study data reveals both small between-group differences and significant within-group heterogeneity. For example, Stroebe et al.'s (2017) findings that gun owners had greater hateful ratings of belief in a dangerous world, perceived take chances of victimization, and the perceived effectiveness of owning a gun for self-defence force were based on inter-grouping differences of <1 point on a seven-point Likert scale. Fearfulness of victimization is therefore a universal fear for gun owners and not-gun owners alike, with of import differences in both quantitative and qualitative aspects of those fears. Kahan and Braham (2003) noted that the gun argue is not then much a debate well-nigh the personal risks of gun buying, as it is a 1 nigh which of two potential fears is most salient—that of "firearm casualties in a globe with insufficient gun control or that of personal defenselessness in a world with excessive control".

Although this "shared fear" hypothesis has not been thoroughly tested in existing research, there is general support for it based on evidence that fear is an especially potent influence on risk cess and decision-making when because depression-frequency catastrophic events (Chanel et al., 2009). In addition, biased risk assessments take been linked to individual feelings near a specific activity. Whereas many activities in the existent world have both high run a risk and loftier benefit, positive attitudes nigh an action are associated with biased judgments of low risk and high benefit while negative attitudes are associated with biased judgments of loftier risk and low benefit (Slovic et al., 2007). These findings match those of the gun argue, whereby catastrophic events like mass shootings can effect in "probability fail," over-estimating the likelihood of run a risk (Sunstein, 2003; Sunstein and Zeckhauser, 2011) with polarized differences regarding guns equally a root cause and gun control as a viable solution. For those that have positive feelings near guns and their perceived do good, the run a risk of gun ownership is minimized as discussed above. However, based on findings from psychological inquiry on fearfulness (Loewenstein et al., 2001; Slovic et al., 2007), the opposite is also likely to be true—those with negative feelings nigh guns who perceive piddling benefit to ownership may tend to over-estimate risks. Consistent with this dichotomy, both calls for legislative gun reform, equally well as gun purchases increase in the wake of mass shootings (Wallace, 2015; Wozniak, 2017), with differences primarily predicted past the relative cocky-serving attributional biases of gun ownership and not-ownership alike (Joslyn and Haider-Markel, 2017).

Psychological research has shown that fear is associated with loss of control, with risks that are unfamiliar and uncontrollable perceived every bit unduly dangerous (Lerner et al., 2015; Sunstein, 2003). Although mass shootings have increased in contempo years, they remain extremely rare events and correspond a miniscule proportion of overall gun violence. And however, every bit acts of terrorism, they occur in places like schools that are otherwise thought of every bit a suburban "safe spaces," unlike inner cities where violence is more than mundane, and are frequently given sensationalist coverage in the media. A 2019 Harris Poll found that 79% of Americans endorse stress as a result of the possibility of a mass shooting, with nearly a third reporting that they "cannot go anywhere without worrying about existence a victim" (American Psychological Association, 2019). While some bear witness suggests that gun owners may be more than concerned about mass shootings than non-gun owners (Dowd-Arrow et al., 2019), this is again a quantitative difference as with fear of victimization more than generally. There is little doubt that parental fears about children beingness victims of gun violence were particularly heightened in the wake of Columbine (Altheide, 2019) and it is likely that subsequent school shootings at Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook Elementary, and Stoneman Douglas High accept been peculiarly impactful in the minds of those calling for increasing restrictions on gun ownership. For those privileged to be accustomed to community safe who are less worried about home invasion and have faith in the constabulary to provide protection, fantasizing about "gun gratuitous zones" may reflect a want to recreate condom spaces in the wake of mass shootings that invoke feelings of loss of command.

Altheide (2019) has argued that mass shootings in the Us post-Columbine have been embedding inside a larger cultural narrative of terrorism, with "expanded social control and policies that helped legitimate the war on terror". Sunstein and Zeckhauser (2011) have similarly noted that following terrorist attacks, the public tends to demand responses from government, favoring precautionary measures that are "not justified by any plausible assay of expected utility" and over-estimating potential benefits. Nonetheless, such responses may non only be ineffective, simply potentially dissentious. For example, although collective anxieties in the wake of the ix/11 terrorist attacks resulted in the rapid implementation of new screening procedures for boarding airplanes, information technology has been argued that the "theater" of response may take done well to decrease fright without any evidence of actual effectiveness in reducing danger (Graham, 2019) while perhaps even increasing overall bloodshed by fugitive air travel in favor of driving (Sunstein, 2003; Sunstein and Zeckhauser, 2011).

Every bit with the literature on DGU, the available evidence supporting the effectiveness of specific gun laws in reducing gun violence is less than definitive (Koper et al., 2004; Hahn et al., 2005; Lee et al., 2017; Webster and Wintemute, 2015), leaving the utility of gun reform legislation open to debate and motivated reasoning. Several authors accept argued that even if proposed gun command measures are unlikely to deter mass shooters, "doing something is ameliorate than nothing" (Play tricks and DeLateur, 2014) and that ineffective counter-terrorism responses are worthwhile if they reduce public fright (Sunstein and Zeckhauser, 2011). Crucially however, this perspective fails to consider the bear upon of gun control legislation on the fears of those who value guns for self-protection. For them, removing guns from law-abiding "skillful guys" while doing nada to deter access to the "bad guys" who commit crimes is casuistic anathema. Gun owners and gun advocates likewise refuse the concept of "prophylactic spaces" and regard the notion of "gun costless zones" as a liability that invites rather than prevents acts of terrorism. In other words, gun control proposals designed to decrease fear have the opposite of their intended effect on those who view guns as symbols of personal safety, increasing rather than decreasing their fears independently of any actual furnishings on gun violence. Such policies are therefore non-starters, and will remain non-starters, for the sizeable proportion of Americans who regard guns every bit essential for self-preservation.

Conclusion

In 2006, Braman and Kahan noted that "the Great American Gun Debate… has convulsed the national polity for the meliorate office of four decades without producing results satisfactory to either side" and argued that consequentialist arguments about public wellness risks based on cost–benefit analysis are trumped by the cultural meanings of guns to the point of being "politically inert" (Braman and Kahan, 2006). More than a decade afterward, that statement is iterated in this series on "What Guns Hateful". In this essay, it is farther argued that persisting debates about the effectiveness of DGU and gun command legislation are at their heart trumped by shared concerns nearly personal safety, victimization, and mass shootings within a larger culture of fear, with polarized opinions nigh how to best mitigate those fears that are adamant by the symbolic, cultural, and personal meanings of guns and gun ownership.

Coming full circumvolve to the riddle, "Do guns impale people or practise people impale people?", a psychologically informed perspective rejects the question equally a faux dichotomy that can be resolved by the statement, "people kill people… with guns". It likewise suggests a way forward by acknowledging both mutual fears and individual differences across the limited, binary extravaganza of the gun debate that is mired in endless arguments over disputed facts. For meaningful legislative change to occur, the debate must be steered away from its portrayal as 2 immutable sides caught between not doing annihilation on the one hand and enacting sweeping bans or repealing the 2nd Amendment on the other. In reality, public attitudes towards gun command are more nuanced than that, with back up or opposition to specific gun control proposals predicted by distinct psychological and cultural factors (Wozniak, 2017) such that achieving consensus may prove less elusive than is mostly assumed. Appropriately, gun reform proposals should focus on "depression hanging fruit" where in that location is broad support such as requiring and enforcing universal background checks, enacting "ruby-red flag" laws balanced by guaranteeing gun ownership rights to constabulary-abiding citizens, and implementing public safe campaigns that promote prophylactic firearm handling and storage. Finally, the Dickey Amendment should be repealed so that research can inform public health interventions aimed at reducing gun violence and and so that individuals can replace motivated reasoning with testify-based decision-making about personal gun ownership and guns in order.

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   Joseph M. Pierre

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Pierre, J.M. The psychology of guns: risk, fear, and motivated reasoning. Palgrave Commun 5, 159 (2019). https://doi.org/x.1057/s41599-019-0373-z

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• Received: 30 July 2019

• Accepted: 27 November 2019

• Published: 10 December 2019

• DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-019-0373-z

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