NCJ Number
220311
Journal
Criminology Volume: 45 Issue: 3 Dated: August 2007 Pages: 519-546
Date Published
August 2007
Length
28 pages
Annotation
This study identified factors that influenced household gun-collection size after controlling for factors that make households more likely to own guns, i.e., concern about protection (self-defense) and involvement in sport shooting/hunting.
Abstract
Gun-owners who reported a protective reason for having at least one gun were more likely to report smaller firearm collections than other gun owners. This finding supports the concept of only a partial overlap between protective and sporting gun subcultures. In gun-owning households, the average expected collection size reported by males compared with females was smaller by a factor of .73. In addition, Hispanics and persons ages 65 and older reported smaller gun collections; and African-Americans were more likely to report being in a non-gun-owning household. Those reporting incomes between $35,000 and $50,000 or over $75,000 were more likely to have larger gun collections. The aforementioned patterns of gun ownership and collection size may have implications for burglary risk, since earlier research has linked local gun density to increased burglary victimization. Parallel analyses were conducted on two national surveys conducted in the mid-1990s, the National Study of Private Ownership of Firearms in the United States (Police Foundation, 1998), and the Survey of Gun Owners in the United States (Hemenway and Azrael, 2000b). Each study used a national random-digit-dial telephone survey of one randomly selected adult (18 years old or older) within each household. 3 tables, 2 figures, and 60 references