The Gun Gap

Abstract

Abstract To understand public opinion and political behavior, researchers typically sort people by self-identified groupings such as party identification, race, gender, education, and income. This book advances gun owners as a new classification. It demonstrates a “gun gap,” which captures the differences between gun owners and nonowners, and shows how this gap improves conventional models of political behavior. The gun gap in fact represents an important explanation for voter choice, voter turnout, perceptions of personal and public safety, preferences for gun control policies, and support for the death penalty. Moreover, the gun gap is growing. During the 1970s and 1980s, it was small. However, legislative battles over guns in the early 1990s marked a significant growth in the gun gap that continues to this day. The 2016 presidential election witnessed the largest recorded gun gap in history. The gun gap in voter choice was nearly three times larger in 2016 than the gender gap, and it exceeded age and education gaps by notable margins. This book also focuses on variation among gun owners. Gun owners are not a monolith but exhibit attitudinal and behavioral differences that can be as large as the gap between gun owners and nonowners. The gun gap thus affords a new and compelling vantage point to evaluate modern mass politics.