There is a paradox when it comes to guns in America. In states like California, gun ownership has doubled while murder rates have dropped substantially. Most guns are used for suicide rather than crime and fewer people commit suicide with guns in the US than do by hanging in Japan. Almost one in three US adults owns at least one gun, and they are predominantly white married men over the age of 55, which dispels the myth that more guns lead to more crime or more murders.
But though they are not criminals, or they couldn't own guns, gun owners are are more than twice as likely as non-gun owners to be associated with an active 'social gun culture' where either their family or friends own guns. Still, some advocates claim gun is responsible for 'violence' - by counting suicides as violence. By including suicides as violence, and by counting criminals who use guns and are killed as both committing a gun crime and being killed by gun violence (being shot by police) the number seems high, at 33,636 people, even though the actual murder rate is down 20 percent since 2000.
The researchers analyzed the responses of 4,000 nationally representative US adults to a survey on gun ownership and social activities with friends and family that involved guns. Almost one in three (29.1%) respondents said they owned at least one gun. Gun owners were predominantly white men over the age of 55, and married. Gun owners were more than twice as likely as non-gun owners to have family or friends who owned guns or practiced at a shooting or hunted with them, which the authors of a new paper in Injury Prevention call 'gun culture'. However, only about 500 annual gun deaths involve rifles.
Rates of gun ownership and gun deaths were higher in states that did not make gun ownership more difficult. Federal laws require background checks. Gun ownership among rates varied widely, with the lowest rate in tiny Delaware at 5.2%, and while the wilderness people in Alaska had the highest at 61.7%.
Vermont had the highest rates of gun ownership in the north east of the country (28.8%), North Dakota had 47.9% in the Midwest and Arkansas was highest in the south with 57.9%. Gun ownership rates were 50% higher in those states with high gun death rates as they were in those with low gun death rates, the findings showed.
"Although notions of protection of one's family and property originally justified gun ownership, [this] is today sustained in public consciousness much more through calls to constitutionally enshrined social values, reinforced intermittently by outrage at efforts to limit widespread gun availability," said the researchers.
The results suggest that the prevailing social gun culture in the US should be factored in to the planning and implementation of prudent gun policies designed to reduce the harms associated with gun ownership, they conclude.