Responsible Firearms Ownership 

In Guns We Trust

By Richard Morin

We all know why so many law-abiding Americans own guns: Some buy them for protection against
crime. Others collect them as objets d'art. Some love to hunt or target shoot.

But two Ohio State University researchers argue there's another significant factor behind America's
infatuation with firearms: Many Americans who own guns don't trust the federal government.

Sociology professors Robert M. Jiobu and Timothy J. Curry assert that this mistrust complicates
government efforts to control the sale and possession of guns. In fact, they suggest that gun control
laws may have exactly the opposite effect: "To mandate decreased gun ownership through gun
control legislation may only encourage those people who have little faith in the government to
stockpile weapons," they claim in the latest issue of Social Science Quarterly.

Curry and Jiobu analyzed data collected between 1988 and 1996 from the General Social Survey
(GSS), the nation's most closely watched barometer of social trends. The survey included questions
about gun ownership and three questions that asked how much confidence people have in the
executive branch of government, in the Supreme Court and in Congress.

Overall, the researchers found that 44 percent of the more than 6,000 respondents had "hardly any"
confidence in at least one of the government branches -- "significantly more than expressed similar
levels of mistrust in the 1960s," Curry said.

They also found that those who mistrusted all branches of the federal government were significantly
more likely to own a gun (37 percent) than those who trusted all three (23 percent) -- a finding that
remained strong even after they controlled for relevant variables such as political ideology, gender,
age, education, general fear of crime, whether the respondents had been crime victims in the previous
year, whether they or someone in their household hunted, what region of the country they lived in and
whether they lived in a city, in the suburbs or in a rural area.

"If a policy goal of the federal government is to decrease gun ownership among the general
population, then our results suggest that increasing trust in government ought to be an equally
important goal," Jiobu and Curry wrote.