By Joseph P. Tartaro | Executive Editor
A study by University of Kansas researchers analyzed data from the General Social Survey between 1972 through 2012 and found that gun owners are more likely to register to vote and more likely to vote in presidential elections than non-gun owners. (Those findings, which were presented at the American Political Science Association in August, have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.)
Additional analysis the researchers did on Pew Research Center 2013 data found that gun owners were also more likely to post on social media about guns, contact a public official about gun policy, sign a gun petition and to contribute money to organizations related to gun policy.
Most media reports of the study took the same lead as the San Antonio Express News, saying “It may be that the NRA has an inordinate amount of influence in American politics, given most voters favor gun control and Congress is yet to pass it.
“Or it may be, as a new study suggests, that gun owners are more politically engaged than Americans who don’t own guns.”
The study released Sept. 2 by political scientists at the University of Kansas, found significantly more gun owners were politically active and voted in presidential elections than those who did not own guns over the last 40 years—and the gap is growing.
The reason: today’s gun owner is more likely than a gun owner in the 1970s to think of political engagement as an extension of Second Amendment rights, according to the study.
“This modern gun owner identity includes a conception of gun owners as people who take direct action to ensure their beliefs match behavior,” write study authors Donald Haider-Markel, Mark Joslyn, and Abigail Vegter. “Thus, the gun-owner’s self-mobilization makes her more likely to participate in all forms of politics.”
According to the San Antonio newspaper, the leader of Connecticut’s largest gun rights group agrees.
“There is always the possibility for a tyrannical government to take power as we have seen across the world and throughout history,” Scott Wilson, president of the 31,000-member Connecticut Citizens Defense League, told the newspaper. “So to maintain our constitutional republic, every single person who believes in liberty and the Constitution should actively take a role and participate in the legislative process.”
The nation’s two largest gun groups agreed with the study’s findings but objected to the premise that, if not for the power of the NRA, more gun control legislation would have been passed – particularly in the wake of national tragedies such as the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre.
“That viewpoint does not recognize the reality of the year-over-year effect of the organized disparagement of law-abiding gun owners and their conflation with criminals who misuse guns carried out by gun control politicians … and the disproportionate attention that treatment gets by the remaining traditional media,” said Michael Bazinet, spokesman of the Newtown-based National Shooting Sports Foundation, the gun industry’s 12,000-member trade association. “Maybe that’s really why gun owners are more politically active.”
The 5 million-member NRA agreed.
“We vote because every single day in this country politicians threaten to take away our constitutional right to self-defense,” NRA spokesperson Catherine Mortensen told reporters. “We vote because we know if we are silent we will lose our fundamental right to protect and defend ourselves.”
It should be noted that the study estimated the 20% of gunowners were NRA members, but that number doesn’t track actual Association figures.
The study, which uses survey data from a nonpartisan research group at the University of Chicago, does not include voting records from the 2016 presidential election, and therefore does not account for mobilization efforts by gun violence prevention groups, such as Newtown Action Alliance and Sandy Hook Promise.
The study shows that in the 2012 election, 72 percent of gun owners voted, compared to 61 percent of non-gun owners, a difference of 11 percentage points. The gap has widened from 1972, when the voting margin of gun owners over non-gun owners was 2 percentage points.
The study’s authors say politically engaged gun owners, more than the NRA, explain why federal gun laws in the United States have remained the same in the wake of mass shootings.
The study’s authors note that about 20 percent of gun owners are members of the NRA.
“We do not dispute the significant influence of gun rights groups in American politics, yet we contend that gun-owners as a sub-population…have developed a distinct social identity around gun ownership,” the study says. “[A]nd as a function of this identity, (they) are mobilized to participate in politics more often and through a variety of forms.”
The study analyzed perceptions of gun owners as a distinct minority in America, and divvied the population as into three groups regardless of political party affiliation: avowed gunowners, those who said they lived in a household with guns, and those who do not own guns. It also noted differences in state level concentrations of gun owners. There is considerable variation in this measure, with a low in Delaware at 5.2% to 61.7% in Alaska (Kalesan et al. 2016).
“We theorize that this is a two-fold answer. Gun issues and gun rights have become a more salient issue in recent years,” said Abbie Vegter, a political science graduate student who collaborated with University of Kansas political professors Don Haider-Markel and Mark Joslyn on the new research.
“But we think there’s something else going on,” she added. “As these gun issues are becoming more salient, gun owners have developed a unique, distinct political identity around being a gun owner.”
The profile of a typical gun owner has also shifted over the last 30 years, according to the study. In the 1980s, more than 60 percent of gun owners said they owned firearms for hunting and 25 percent said they owned guns for protection, according to the Pew Research Center. Today, two-thirds of gun owners say they own guns for protection and less than 40 percent cite hunting as a reason for owning a firearm.
How this will play out on Nov. 6 remains to be seen.
