Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, JD Vance and Tim Walz all have something in common. Along with an estimated 42% of American adults, they have lived in a home with at least one gun.

Gun ownership in the United States is widespread and cuts across cultural divides including race, class and political ideology. But owning a gun can mean very different things to different people.

One thing American gun owners tend to agree on, no matter their differences, is that guns are for personal protection. In a 2023 Pew survey, 72% of gun owners reported that they owned a firearm at least in part for protection, and 81% of gun owners reported that owning a gun helped them to feel safer. This perspective contrasts to that of gun owners in other developed economies, who generally report that guns are more dangerous than safe and that they own a gun for some other reason.

I’m a psychologist at UW-Madison who studies contemporary society. In the lab, my colleagues and I have been investigating this feeling of safety that American gun owners report. We’re trying to get a more complete sense of just what people are using their firearms to protect against. Our research suggests it goes much deeper than physical threats.

Firearms can help owners find purpose  

By combining social-scientific research on firearm ownership with a raft of interviews, we’ve developed a theory that gun owners aren’t just protecting against the specific threat of physical violence. Owners also are using a gun to protect their psychological selves. Owning a gun helps them feel more in control of the world around them and more able to live meaningful, purposeful lives that connect to the people and communities they care for.

This sort of protection may be especially appealing to those who think that the normal institutions of society — such as police or the government — are unable or unwilling to keep them safe. They feel they need to take protection into their own hands.

But this use of a deadly weapon to provide comfort and solace may come at a cost, because firearms often bring a heightened sense of vigilance with them. Firearm instructors often teach owners to be especially aware of their environment and all the potential dangers and threats. When gun owners look for danger, they often are more likely to find it.

Gun owners may end up perceiving the world as a more dangerous place, institutions as more uncaring or incompetent, and their own private actions as all the more important for securing their lives and livelihoods.

Having gun increases vigilance, anxiety

What does this cycle of protection and threat look like in everyday life? My colleagues and I recently ran a study to investigate. We’re still undergoing peer review, so our work is not final.

We recruited a group of more than 150 firearm owners who told us they regularly carry their guns, along with more than 100 demographically matched Americans who have never owned a gun. Over two weeks, our research team texted the participants at two random times each day, asking them to fill out a survey telling us what they were doing and how they were feeling.

To get a sense of how guns change the psychological landscape of their owners, we divided our gun-carrying group into two. When we texted one half of the group, before we asked any other questions, we asked if they had their gun accessible and why they’d made that decision. For the other half of our gun-owning participants, and for our non-gun-owning group, firearms and carrying guns never came up.

When subtly reminded of guns in general — regardless of whether their gun was accessible — our participants reported feeling more safe and in control and that their lives were more meaningful. Thanks to our random-assignment procedure, we can be pretty confident that it was the thinking about guns, as opposed to any differences in the groups themselves, that caused this increase in psychological well-being.

About half of the times that we texted, the gun owners told us that they had a gun accessible at that moment. When a gun was handy, our participants told us that they were feeling more vigilant and anxious, and that their immediate situation was more chaotic. This result didn’t seem to be driven by owners choosing to have guns available when they were putting themselves into objectively more dangerous situations: We found the same pattern in the data when our participants were sitting at home, watching television.

Wisconsin study continues, diversifies 

Contemporary American gun ownership may come with conflicting messages. First, a gun is a thing you can use to bolster your fundamental psychological needs to feel safe, in control and like you matter and belong. Second, having a gun focuses your attention on the dangers of the world.

By both fueling a sense of danger and and rescuing people from that fear, messaging around guns may end up locking some owners into a sort of doom loop.

My collaborators and I are now exploring whether stressing other parts of gun ownership may help owners to move beyond this negative spiral. For instance, while owners often talk about “danger,” they also talk frequently about “responsibility.”

Being a responsible gun owner is central to many owners’ identities. In one study, 97% of owners reported that they were “more responsible than the average gun owner,” and 23% rated themselves as being in the top 1% of responsibility overall. This, of course, is statistically impossible.

To more fully understand responsible firearm ownership, we are interviewing gun owners from across Wisconsin. We’re tapping into as many of the ways of owning a gun as we can. We’re talking with protective owners, hunters, sport shooters, collectors, people in urban and rural areas, men, women, young, old, liberals and conservatives. We also are trying to capture the complex ways that race shapes ownership.

Who do gun owners feel they are responsible for? What kinds of actions do they think responsible owners take?

We hope to learn more about the many ways people conceptualize what a gun can do for them. American gun cultures are complex and distinct. By exploring the views that support firearm ownership, we can better understand what it means to live in the U.S. today.