The Inertia of Gun Ownership: Social Ties, Childhood Exposure, and the Limits of Threat-Based Explanations

• In Event: Open Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 21: Political Behavior and Identity

Abstract

Firearms remain deeply embedded in American social life even as violent crime has declined and gun regulation remains politically stalemated. A striking feature of this stalemate is the near-universal invocation of self-defense as the justification for gun ownership. This paper evaluates whether perceived threat in fact structures gun ownership patterns or whether ownership is more strongly anchored in social environments in which firearms are familiar and expected.

Using a nationally representative survey conducted in early 2025, I test two broad explanations. First, I assess threat-based accounts by measuring fear, anger, and perceived likelihood of harm across multiple scenarios, including crime, political extremism, state actors, and mass violence, alongside indicators of racialized and gendered threat. Second, I examine social embeddedness through measures of childhood exposure to firearms and the extent to which gun ownership is common within respondents’ adult family and friendship networks.

Perceived threat shows limited and inconsistent associations with (prospective) gun ownership. Instrumental effects appear only in narrow, politically bounded cases, and cultural-threat indicators are modest once other factors are considered. In contrast, social embeddedness produces large, graded, and highly consistent associations across major social groups, substantially exceeding the effects of threat.

These findings support what I call the inertia of gun ownership: contemporary ownership patterns are more consistent with path-dependent social reproduction than with reactive responses to perceived danger. Rather than fluctuating with changing threat environments, gun ownership appears anchored in durable social ties in combination with early-life exposure. This structural inertia helps explain both the persistence of gun prevalence despite declining objective risk and the durability of political conflict surrounding attempts at regulation.

Author

• Armin Sauermann, Washington University in St. Louis