Pathways to Voluntary Gun Relinquishment

• In Event: Roundtable: Drugs and Guns: Recent Reforms

Abstract

Despite a strong pro-gun culture in America, some individuals decide to give up their guns today. Nevertheless, voluntary gun relinquishment remains substantially underexplored in gun research, even though it can unfold possible mitigating factors to persistent desires for guns, especially from those at risk of committing gun violence.

This study investigates the pathways to voluntary gun relinquishment by interviewing former gun owners and inductively analyzing their responses. Interviewees are recruited from college campuses, community organizations, gun buyback programs, and online forums.

Preliminary findings indicate that voluntary gun relinquishment often results from direct or indirect experiences with gun violence at home. After interviewees witnessed the destructiveness of guns firsthand, their fear of victimization by someone familiar outweighed other reasons for gun ownership. However, the varying degrees of palpability of gun violence may influence the interviewees’ future gun ownership status, mediated by demographics and other contexts.

These novel findings not only remain consistent with the existing literature on the dynamic nature of gun ownership but also highlight the unique processes that internally motivate individuals to relinquish guns. Future research should explore which competing rationales make voluntary gun relinquishment more or less permanent to advance our knowledge of gun ownership as a whole.

Author

• Mary Lee, University of California, Irvine