Assessing College Students’ Firearm Ownership: Prevalence, Predictors, and Implications for Campus Policies

• In Event: Complexities of Firearm Use, Violence, and Enforcement

Abstract

The purposes are two-fold: 1) to estimate the prevalence of college students personally owning a firearm on/near campus (CSFO), and 2) to identify predictors of CSFO.
Guided by Valdebenito et al.’s (2017) vulnerability/self-protection theory of weapon carrying, Buttrick’s (2020) adult protective gun ownership model, and Baiden et al.’s (2024) gun carry model, we identified individual-level correlates of college student gun ownership. We adapted “campus climate” from the theoretical framework consistent with the communities and crime research (e.g., Sampson et al., 1997) as applied to adolescent in-school weapon possession research (e.g., Wilcox and Clayton, 2001).
Using HLM, we tested our hypotheses using self-report responses from over 68,000 undergraduates and graduates who participated in the 2022/2023 Healthy Minds survey administered by 135 postsecondary institutions in the US.
Preliminary estimates reveal that among all the respondents, 2.43% of students owned a firearm (handgun, long gun, or both) on or near campus during the 2022/23 academic year. A larger percentage of cismales owned at least one gun (4.13%) compared to cisfemales (1.91%) and non-cisgender (1.31%). Results revealed that individual- and campus climate-level characteristics and cross-level interactions explain CSFO.
Our results have implications for future CSFO research and institutional firearms policies (e.g., concealed carrying) on campus

Authors

• Bonnie Sue Fisher, University of Cincinnati

• John J. Sloan III, University of Alabama at Birmingham

• Bradford Reyns, Weber State University

• Nicolas Williams, University of Cincinnati