Researchers Look at Differences Between Gun-Owning Men and Women

Men and women are very different critters. We simply don't think the same way or about the same things, necessarily. There are exceptions, obviously. People are individuals, not duplicated cutouts who all do and think the same way, despite what many on the left might seem to think. However, there are similarities in how the sexes think about a lot of things, such as guns and why they own one.

This is interesting because I came across a piece that seems to tell us how those differences present themselves.

In the cultural and political conversation (which includes cinema, as Monica Castillo documents), women wielding weapons is often treated as a curiosity, but in real life it’s anything but. As Rosanna Smart and Andrew Morral and Margaret Kelley point out in their articles, men’s reasons for firearm ownership cannot simply be mapped onto women.

Smart and Morral document that after more than a decade of stable levels of gun ownership, women’s personal gun ownership rose sharply from 15% of women owning a gun in 2021 to 16% of women owning a gun in 2024. Women are now nearly a third of all gun owners, up from roughly a quarter just six years ago. The pandemic-era firearm shopping spree was concentrated among Republican women and women in the upper Midwest. As a result, the political gap in female ownership has widened sharply: Republican women are now nearly 4 times more likely to own a gun than Democratic women.  

In a study of 55 Midwestern female gun owners, Kelley finds that, like men, women’s motivations to own a firearm stem from a fear of victimization and the corresponding desire to be able to protect themselves and others. She also finds that women relate differently to their firearms: They are less likely to carry in public, store guns loaded, or brandish weapons defensively.

That's interesting.

Frankly, considering the disparity of strength between women and those who might mean them harm — which is usually a man, for the record — I'd think they want to even the odds.

I think part of the problem, though, is that a lot of guys actually do talk down to women who own guns, and as a result, many women probably aren't going to be part of the same communities that might inform their decision-making better.

Then again, I'm a man, so my line of thinking is going to be different.

However, the relationship between women and guns isn't always a legal one. While women don't account for a large portion of violent crime offenders, they do play a role in so-called gun violence, and not necessarily as victims.

If behind many great men are great women, behind many men illicitly obtaining guns are women who helped them do it. Anthony Braga and Marianna Mitchem as well as Brooklyhnn Hitchens and Necole Muhammad focus our attention on women who engage in straw purchasing — that is, they illegally purchase a firearm for someone else. This is often not a story of empowered ownership; it is a story of how disadvantage funnels women into gun markets in ways that put them at greater risk. Jeff Asher investigates lingering questions about women’s gun ownership, many of which spotty data cannot answer. Demographic increases in ownership do not match observed decreases in victimization — though a lag is certainly possible. In general, better causal research is urgently needed to evaluate this question.

I'm not entirely sold on the framing here, though. The amount of money someone might make conducting a straw buy is probably not enough to make it purely an economic question, at least with regard to "disadvantage" versus privilege or anything. These women made a choice; one they were informed during the buying process was illegal, and still they did it.

Yeah, being broke probably didn't help, but at the end of the day,  they still crossed the line of their own free will. I'm not going to let that get reframed out of the picture. Women cannot be treated as independent individuals, only to pretend they're the victims when they do something illegal that they knew was illegal. I prefer to treat them as mature adults with full agency over their actions, because that's what my own experiences have shown me to be the case.

Interviews with actual women who own guns? Great work.

Excuse-making for straw buyers? Nah.

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