Who Are the Liberal Gun Owners?

Abstract

In the recent renaissance of interest in guns among sociologists, studies of the political conservatism of gun owners have proliferated, but we still know very little about politically liberal gun owners. This despite the fact that one in five U.S. gun owners (some 12 million adults) self‐identifies as liberal. This exploratory study, therefore, seeks to understand what seems on the surface to be an interesting and not rare category in American society: the liberal gun owner. In particular, we seek to answer two questions: Do liberal gun owners differ from other liberals who do not own guns and from other gun owners who are not liberal? We answer these questions using data from the General Social Survey, treating liberal gun owners as a category rather than a point on a continuum. Binary and multinomial logistic regressions suggest ways in which liberal gun owners are a distinct group, more resembling their fellow gun owners in their demographic and geographic backgrounds, but differing from moderate and/or conservative gun owners in important ways, including in their propensity to be hunters, religious affiliation, religiosity, and punitive attitudes.