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Guns in America: A liberal gun-owning sociologist offers five ways to understand America's culture of firearms

from the San Francisco Bay Area, I became a first-time gun owner as a 42-year-old in 2011. I began a now 14-year journey into an unfamiliar and complex world of firearms. In , I draw on both my personal experiences and sociological observations to understand the long-standing presence of a robust legal gun culture in America.

In contrast to the , which focus on gun deviance and harm, I find there is more to firearms than criminal violence, injury and death; more to gun owners than straight white men; and more to gun culture than democracy-destroying right-wing politics.

Let me share five observations essential to understanding guns in America:

1. Guns are normal

About 86 million American adults——own at least one of the estimated in the U.S. today.

Imagine if everyone who uses TikTok in the U.S. owned a gun—and then add the population of New York City. That is enough gun owners to fill over 1,000 NFL stadiums.

Humans have used projectile weapons like rocks and spears . This unbroken history continues in every society, with firearms as the weapon of choice in all but the most isolated communities. People who could legally own guns in colonial America . Even today, civilian firearms ownership remains exceptionally high in the U.S. .

The right of everyday Americans to own guns is , enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and many state constitutions.

2. Gun culture 2.0

The culture of guns in the U.S. .

Before the mid-1800s, people primarily used firearms for practical purposes: hunting for food, defense from and offense against indigenous populations, controlling enslaved people, expanding territory and fighting against oppressive rulers.

Starting in the mid-1800s, Americans developed a more complex gun culture that included recreational hunting, organized target shooting and gun collecting. These elements continue today, but, in a shift, Americans increasingly own guns for self-defense.

Evidence for the evolution to what I call "Gun Culture 2.0" appears in three key areas: , the beginning in the 1980s, and changes in both the sold and , especially toward small, concealable pistols.

3. Gun ownership is diverse

have a particularly strong tradition of gun ownership dating at least to the 19th-century abolitionist movement.

Today, 1 in 4 Black Americans, as well as 1 in 5 Latinos and 1 in 4 women, . Twenty percent of gun owners consider themselves . For every four evangelical Protestants who own handguns, three people own them too. Scholars are even beginning to discover the importance of .

Gun Culture 2.0 is more diverse and inclusive than the United States' historical gun culture because security is a universal human concern.

The response to feelings of insecurity varies. Portfolios of protective measures in the U.S. include home security systems, dogs, the hyperlocal social networking service Nextdoor, gated communities and firearms.

4. Guns are lethal tools

Many tools like knives and chainsaws are lethal, meaning they have the capacity to cause death. Guns differ because their lethality is . Consequently, guns can make dangerous situations more deadly.

Despite their ubiquity and deadly potential, accidental firearm deaths are relatively rare and declining in the U.S., numbering annually in recent years. Most gun deaths are intentional, with and of in 2023.

While the U.S. has a moderate overall suicide rate compared with other developed countries, it has a that substantially exceeds these other nations. This is because firearms are widely available and highly lethal. When people attempt suicide using guns, .

Similarly, although the U.S. is not exceedingly violent or criminal compared with peer nations, its criminal violence because these lethal tools are more frequently involved.

5. Guns are paradoxical

Despite high rates of firearm suicide and homicide, most guns in the U.S. will not kill anyone, and most American gun owners will not commit violence against themselves or others. My calculations, based on the , indicate that just one gun death occurred per 8,560 firearms and 1,840 gun owners—meaning at least 99.99% of guns and 99.95% of gun owners were not directly involved in fatalities that year.

These observations collectively point to a final insight: Guns resist simple categorization and embody multiple paradoxes.

To different people, they are fun and frightening, dangerous and protective, diffuse and concentrated, unifying and divisive, attractive and repulsive, interesting and controversial, useful and useless, good and bad, and neither good nor bad.

This is to say, guns are not inherently anything. They take on different meanings according to the various purposes to which people put them.

A realistic view requires maintaining a clear-eyed understanding of the lethal capabilities of firearms. But the tendency to focus exclusively on firearms-related harms, while understandable, becomes a problem, in my view, when it fails to acknowledge the normality of guns and the diversity of gun owners.