White Gun Ownership and NRA Membership: The Influence of Outgroup Attitudes

• In Event: Public Opinion, Mobilization and Race

Abstract

Do outgroup attitudes influence gun ownership and NRA membership among whites in the U.S.? Historians, sociologists and political scientists have suggested that gun ownership is not simply an instrumental act but rather a symbolic expression of deeply held social identities. Recent qualitative studies suggest that both racial and gender attitudes are implicated in the decision to own a gun (Carlson 2015, Stroud 2012). Others have suggested that such attitudes are reinforced by training programs which are almost exclusively sponsored by the National Rifle Association (Shapira and Simon 2018).

In earlier research we argued that the gun rights narratives that emerged in the post Civil Rights era drew significantly on “New Right” narratives that serve to activate racial and gender-based resentments. Consistent with our expectations, analyses of survey and experimental data found that racial prejudice and sexism influenced whites’ gun policy preferences (Filindra and Kaplan 2017, Filindra and Kaplan 2016, Kaplan and Filindra 2018). However, this work has not investigated the role of outgroup attitudes in shaping gun ownership or the intent to purchase a firearm among whites. To-date only two survey based studies have looked at the role of racial prejudice in shaping whites’ gun ownership (Young 1985, O'Brien et al. 2013). Both are limited to a single dataset and do not include several factors known to influence gun-related attitudes. No survey based study to-date has looked at the role of sexism on whites’ gun ownership and no survey based study to-date has looked at the relationship between outgroup attitudes and NRA membership.

The proposed study seeks to investigate the role of both racial resentment and sexism in shaping white Americans’ gun ownership, intent to own firearms, and NRA membership. We leverage the 2004-2016 ANES datasets (all that include gun ownership) as well as an original 2015 nationally representative survey (UIC Survey) to investigate the role of both racial resentment and sexism in driving gun ownership among whites. The 2015 UIC Survey also includes measures on NRA membership and intent to purchase a firearm, as well as the types of firearms that respondents own. This analysis will also look at whether racial resentment and sexism play a role in driving NRA membership, intent to purchase a firearm, or the type of firearm owned. We use a Heckman two-step self-selection model to examine the relationship between outgroup attitudes and NRA membership (with the first step modeling gun ownership). Results from initial analyses indicate that racism is related to NRA membership and to gun ownership throughout the 21st century.


Carlson, Jennifer. 2015. Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline. New York: Oxford University Press.

Filindra, Alexandra, and Noah Kaplan. 2017. "Testing Theories of Gun Policy Preferences Among Blacks, Latinos, and Whites in America." Social Science Quarterly 98(2): 413-428.

Filindra, Alexandra, and Noah J. Kaplan. 2016. "Racial Resentment and Whites’ Gun Policy Preferences in Contemporary America." Political Behavior 38(2): 255-275.

Kaplan, Noah and Alexandra Filindra. 2018. “’They Are Raping Your Gun Rights’: Sexism and Americans’ Gun Policy Preferences.” Presented at the 2018 conference of the Western Political Science Association held in San Francisco, March 29-31.

O'Brien, Kerry, Walter Forrest, Dermot Lynott, and Michael Daly. 2013. "Racism, Gun Ownership and Gun Control: Biased Attitudes in US Whites May Influence Policy Decisions." PLOSOne.org (October 31, 2013) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0077552.

Shapira, Harel, and Samantha J. Simon. 2018. "Learning to Need a Gun." Qualitative Sociology 41(1): 1-20.

Stroud, Angela. 2012. "Good Guys With Guns: Hegemonic Masculinity and Concealed Handguns." Gender & Society 26(2): 216-238.

Young, Robert L. 1985. "Perceptions of Crime, Racial Attitudes, and Firearms Ownership." Social Forces 64(2): 473-486.

Authors

• Noah J. Kaplan, University of Illinois, Chicago

• Alexandra Filindra, University of Illinois at Chicago