Transmitting Desire: An Experiment on a Novel Measure of Gun Desirability in a Pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic and protests have marked an unprecedented increase in U.S. gun sales. But America has long been an outlier; the stockpile of private guns climbed to almost 300 million in 2017. Scholars use multiple theories to explain why gun sales have tripled since the early 2000s, and why disruptions like the pandemic might cause gun sales. However, scholars have difficulty evaluating these theories with existing retrospective estimates of gun sales and other measures, limiting their ability to test theory or suggest policy changes. This study uses the known increase in gun sales during the COVID-19 pandemic to introduce and experimentally validate a novel measure of gun desirability. With a sample of 4,240 U.S. residents, this project demonstrates that gun desirability is a valid measure of inclination toward gun ownership, and that a pandemic video vignette significantly increases overall gun desirability relative to a control video vignette. These results serve as a foundation for future scholarship to (1) discern gun desirability trends, (2) evaluate theorized causes of gun desirability, and (3) consider interventions on those conditions that arouse desire for gun ownership.