What is a gun good for? Esteem and protection in American gun owners

What can we learn from gun owners by asking them about how their guns make them feel? We take a person-centered approach in analyzing a sample of over 4,000 gun owners drawn from a nationally representative survey frame to model the ways in which owners differ in the esteem they feel their guns provide. We find evidence for four distinct subpopulations of ownership, one which generally disagrees that guns help them to feel esteem (11.4% of the sample); two that generally agree that guns provide esteem, albeit to different degrees (39.8% and 30.2%, respectively); and one subpopulation that strongly agrees that guns help them to feel responsible, safe, respected, patriotic, valuable, confident, and in control (18.6%). These subpopulations differ meaningfully in perceptions of the likelihood of needing to use one's gun, in how they think about the nature of responsible firearm ownership, in their actual storage behavior, and they differ in terms of the threats that they believe their guns are able to protect against. These various psychological subpopulations of owners differ far more strongly in their attitudes and behaviors than in their underlying demographics (such as age, gender, ethnicity, education, or urbanicity), reinforcing the importance of understanding gun ownership from the inside out. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).