Gun attitudes on campus: United and divided by safety needs

ABSTRACT

All people share a need for safety. Yet people’s pursuit of safety can conflict when it comes to guns, with some people perceiving guns as a means to safety and others perceiving guns as a threat to safety. We examined this conflict on a U.S. college campus that prohibits guns. We distinguished between people (N = 11,390) who (1) own a gun for protection, (2) own a gun exclusively for reasons other than protection (e.g., collecting, sports), and (3) do not own a gun. Protection owners felt less safe on campus and supported allowing guns on campus. They also reported that they and others would feel safer and that gun violence would decrease if they carried a gun on campus. Non-owners and non-protection owners felt the reverse. The findings suggest that protection concerns, rather than gun-ownership per se, account for diverging perceptions and attitudes about guns and gun control.

KEYWORDS:

• Guns
• health
• needs
• safety
• violence

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Correction

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Deborah Azrael, Jeffrey Bouffard, Marie Helweg-Larsen, David Hemenway, Anne Morien, and Ryan Patten for helpful suggestions in preparing this manuscript.

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at (https://osf.io/esj5f/, https://osf.io/txa5j/ and https://osf.io/8j5zs/

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/txa5j/ and https://osf.io/esj5f/

Notes

1. The materials necessary for replicating the methods appear in a document called UFGun2016 Full Survey Items (https://osf.io/esj5f/). The data and codebook appear in the Data and Codebook folder on the main project page (https://osf.io/txa5j/). The syntax necessary to reproduce the results appear in the GunSafety syntax folder on the paper’s component page called Gun Attitudes on Campus: United and Divided by Safety Needs (https://osf.io/8j5zs/).