And
guns don’t help you sleep better
By Science News Staff / Source
“We want to understand
gun owners’ subjective experiences,” said lead author Dr. Terrence Hill,
a researcher in the School of Sociology at the University of Arizona.
“We’re trying to
understand when guns promote individual well-being, if at all, and that will
add to the discussion of the role of guns in our society.”
In the happiness study,
Dr. Hill and his colleagues analyzed 27 years of data from the National Opinion
Research Center’s General Social Survey, collected between 1973 and 2018.
While the data initially
seemed to point to a positive relationship between gun ownership and happiness,
that relationship disappeared when the scientists factored respondents’ marital
status into their analysis.
It turned out gun owners
were more likely to be married, and being married — not gun ownership — was
driving happiness.
When the researchers
considered marital status and other variables such as race, religion and
education in their analysis, gun owners and non-gun owners exhibited similar
levels of happiness.
“Gun owners will often tell you that guns help them to feel safe, secure and protected. They will also tell you that guns empower them and make them feel independent and strong. They also talk about how just holding and handling guns is pleasurable,” Dr. Hill said.
“If guns do make people
feel safe, secure and protected, if they are empowering, if they are
contributing to feelings of pleasure, then they should promote happiness, but
we don’t find any evidence of that. That calls into question whether or not
these are real feelings that gun owners have, or are they just part of the
culture of owning a gun?”
The data showed no
difference between gun owners and non-gun owners in terms of their level of
sleep disturbance.
Dr. Hill and co-authors also looked at how participants felt about the safety of their neighborhoods.
When they compared sleep
disturbance in gun owners and non-gun owners who lived in dangerous
neighborhoods, they again saw no difference.
“We found that gun
ownership was no consolation for living in a dangerous neighborhood in terms of
the sleep disturbance outcome,” Dr. Hill said.
“The idea that guns can
help people sleep better at night is often presented by interest groups,
popular culture and even commercial products, such as bedside gun holsters or
special pillows with gun compartments that allow people to sleep with or near
their weapon.”
“Whenever people start
to promote a certain type of lifestyle — like a type of exercise or a diet —
public health is there to test it.”
“We think if anybody
makes a claim about how guns are good for people’s health and wellbeing, those
claims should be formally tested with empirical data. We need to test those
claims like we would test any dietary or exercise recommendation.”
The study was published in the journal Preventive Medicine on January 24, 2020.
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Terrence D. Hill et al.
2020. Happiness is a warm gun? Gun ownership and happiness in the United States
(1973-2018). SSM – Population Health 10: 100536; doi:
10.1016/j.ssmph.2020.100536
Terrence D. Hill et al.
2020. Gun ownership and sleep disturbance. Preventive Medicine 132:
105996; doi: 10.1016/j.ypmed.2020.105996