One of the anti-gun left’s favorite conceits is that owning a guns is a sign of anger, paranoia, “compensation” – really, everything that Obama’s “Crackerquiddick” jape was a milder version of. Hollywood has reinforced this idea for decades – at least as far as law-abiding civilians are concerned (gang-bangers, Jodie Foster, action-adventure heroes and rogue-cops-who-push-the-envelope while being dogged by the ineluctible forces of corruption and institutional apathy get a pass, of course).

Of course, anecdodatally it’s nonsense. I cheerfully proclaim my biases – and have many friends and relatives who are as anti-gun as the most wretched Code Pink refuse, our differences in attitudes notwithstanding – but gun owners have always seemed to be generally happier, more secure, more…normal to me. And yes, I’m leaving out the odd “gun nuts” that you most assuredly do meet at gun shows and gun shops – but I don’t hang out with them, they don’t figure into any anecdotes and (this is important) they’re vanishingly rare.

Fifteen years ago, Jeffrey Snyder wrote the article “A Nation of Cowards“, in Public Interest magazine. Along with Sanford Levinson’s “The Embarassing Second Amendment“, it’s one of the bedrock articles of the concealed carry movement. In it, Snyder laid down the historical and moral imperative for civilized people to take responsibility for their own personal safety, including the use of and training at firearms for individual personal defense.

One of the biggest takeaways for me from Snyder’s piece over the last 15 years was his citation of a study by civil rights lawyer Donald Kates and former gun-control majordomo Patricia Harris. In it, Snyder noted, gun owners were found to be less-tolerant of police brutality, more conscientious about protecting the civil liberties of others, and – this is important – generally better-educated, farther advanced in their careers, and happier than non-gun owners.

Years of searching for an online version of this study (or, just in case, any refutations, or claims that Snyder made the whole thing up) have been fruitless.

And, with any luck, irrelevant. Arthur Brooks in the Wall Street Journal updates the whole question:

In words that he has come to regret, Barack Obama opined as to why he was having a hard time winning over many blue-collar voters: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or antitrade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

It was a throwaway line to a private audience at a San Francisco fund-raiser.

I think it’s more significant that liberals say the most outrageous things in what they think is friendly company – but it doesn’t really matter at the moment.

The comment may or may not be an indication of Mr. Obama’s real views about those ordinary Americans who’ve not enjoyed the full fruits of economic growth over the past decades. Yet his casual portrayal no doubt had heads nodding vigorously in assent among his supporters, and probably among many others.

Koff koff.

That anybody would find this portrayal realistic illustrates how little some Americans know about their neighbors. And nothing reveals the truth better than the data on guns.

According to the 2006 General Social Survey, which has tracked gun ownership since 1973, 34% of American homes have guns in them. This statistic is sure to surprise many people in cities like San Francisco – as it did me when I first encountered it. (Growing up in Seattle, I knew nobody who owned a gun.)

That last bit fascinates me. Growing up on the Plains, guns were as normal a part of most families’ lives as power drills and ovens. But to friends of mine from New York, San Franscico, even Kenwood and Highland, guns are as foreign as shrunken heads.

And it’s a pretty normal human reaction to transpose “foreign” into “fearful”, which as we all know is a step shy of “bigoted”.

Which, when it comes to perceptions of your fellow human that impact politics and civil liberties, is just not OK.

Especially when it’s wrong:

Who are all these gun owners? Are they the uneducated poor, left behind? It turns out they have the same level of formal education as nongun owners, on average. Furthermore, they earn 32% more per year than nonowners. Americans with guns are neither a small nor downtrodden group.

Nor are they “bitter.” In 2006, 36% of gun owners said they were “very happy,” while 9% were “not too happy.” Meanwhile, only 30% of people without guns were very happy, and 16% were not too happy.

In 1996, gun owners spent about 15% less of their time than nonowners feeling “outraged at something somebody had done.” It’s easy enough in certain precincts to caricature armed Americans as an angry and miserable fringe group. But it just isn’t true. The data say that the people in the approximately 40 million American households with guns are generally happier than those people in households that don’t have guns.

If you’re a shooter – especially one involved in politics – you know that Second Amendment support isn’t entirely a GOP thing:

The gun-owning happiness gap exists on both sides of the political aisle. Gun-owning Republicans are more likely than nonowning Republicans to be very happy (46% to 37%). Democrats with guns are slightly likelier than Democrats without guns to be very happy as well (32% to 29%). Similarly, holding income constant, one still finds that gun owners are happiest.

While gun ownership it no indicator of being lower-class, miserable or bigoted, I think it’s fair to say that being an anti-gunner is associated with the perception that one is on a higher mental, social and political plane (hence Obama’s audience for Crackerquiddick), though. Which is an irony I’ve always treasured – that while the left has nattered on about class conflict for generations, this issue is the one where the liberal leadership is quite clearly the patricians, arrayed against the shooters, who are – whatever their income, education and mental state, are seen as the plebeians.

Why are gun owners so happy? One plausible reason is a sense of self-reliance, in terms of self-defense or even in terms of the ability to hunt their own dinner.

I’ll vouch for this much; being able to address, capably and seriously, the issue of random violent crime, takes a lot of stress out of life. Not that it’s a lightly-taken responsibility; merely that addressing it soberly and rationally takes one ugly variable out of your life, one most of us are better off without.

A bit of evidence that self-reliance is at work among gun owners comes from the General Social Survey. It asked whether one agrees with the statement, “Those in need have to take care of themselves.” In 2004, gun owners were 10 percentage points more likely than nonowners to agree (60% to 50%).

LEFTYBLOGGER: “Oooh! Gun owners are selfish!“

Nope!

That response is not evidence that gun owners only care about themselves, however. In 2002, they were more likely to give money to charity than people without guns (83% to 75%). This charity gap doesn’t reflect their somewhat higher incomes. Gun owners were also more likely to give in other ways, such as donating blood. Are gun owners unsentimental? In 2004, they were more likely than those without guns to strongly agree that they would “endure all things” for the one they loved (45% to 37%).

One might be tempted to say “shooters are, in every possible way, better citizens, better providers, better neighbors…better people than grabbers”.

But I’ll resist the temptation.

None of this is to dictate what gun policy should be in our nation and its communities, let alone whether gun owners deserve to be happier than those of us without firearms. Guns are an important area of debate about freedom and security, not to mention constitutionality. What we do know, however, is that contrary to the implication of Mr. Obama’s comments, for many Americans, happiness often does indeed involve a warm gun.

A warm gun and a trunk full of targets with the “10” ring blown to hell.

A day at the range is the (second) best stress relief there is. That alone is worth something.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 12:02 pm and is filed under Victim Disarmament. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.