The reason behind Americans’ love affair with handguns

Psychologists say that social-cognitive theories might help explain what motivates Americans to own handguns and advocate for broad rights to carry and use them.

In a recently published article in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Wolfgang Stroebe and Pontus Leander from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, and Arie W. Kruglanski from the University of Maryland propose a model that could help explain America’s love affair with handguns.

Americans are the world’s best-armed citizens and recent polls suggest that most of them procured their guns for self-protection. So scientists, according to Eureka Alerts, conducted surveys of 839 men in the U.S, 404 gun owners and 435 non-owners in order to understand their gun-related beliefs.

In the second part of their study, the authors focused exclusively on gun owners.

They found that Tthe motivation to own a handgun for self-protection is not just about fear of crime, it is also about a more general sense of threat emanating from “the belief that the world is an unpredictable and dangerous place and that society is at the brink of collapse.”

“It is not just concrete, specific threats that change our behaviour, but also vague, general ideas about the threat,” write Stroebe and colleagues. “Even if we cannot pinpoint exactly why we feel threatened, the fact that we are threatened at all can lead us to want to own handguns for self-protection and advocate for more expansive rights to carry and use them.”

They also found that this idea that the world is a dangerous place is strongly influenced by a person’s political beliefs.

In support of their theory they found that fear of crime alone did not explain the need for personal protection, “Different forces are making people feel threatened in different ways, and yet these different types of threat both correlate with increased handgun ownership and stronger beliefs that people have a right to kill in self-defense,” according to Stroebe.

Whereas fear of crime was mainly influenced by past crime victimisation, the more general sense of threat about the world being a dangerous place, was “instead more strongly influenced by a person’s (conservative) political beliefs than by past experience with crime victimization.”

The researchers conducted their first three surveys in May and June 2016, before the Orlando Nightclub shootings. They conducted an additional survey a week after the event, replicating their earlier studies with a new group of male gun owners, to see if the mass shooting influenced their beliefs.

“We expected the Orlando mass shooting to move the needle on the belief systems of gun owners, so we were surprised that there was practically no effect,” says Stroebe.

The authors note that the threat and belief system they tested mainly applies to handgun owners and not owners who only have long guns.

“Long guns such as bolt-action rifles, semi-automatic rifles and shotguns, are linked to hunting and not really linked to a sense of threat,” says Stroebe, “Although the gun owners in our sample owned an average of 4 guns each, we saw no evidence that any of our findings apply to owners of long guns only – that is, those who do not own a handgun.”

Scientists caution that their findings are only applicable in the US, a country with a particular history when it comes to gun ownership.