In Charts: Finding Common Ground on Gun Safety

Disagreements over gun ownership run deep in the US, where firearm violence claims more than 40,000 lives every year. But research has found some common ground: gun owners and non-owners share a desire for safety, even if they disagree on whether guns achieve it.

An analysis of 5,400 US residents suggests that shifting people’s perceptions of what keeps them safe might lead to more viable options for reducing harm. For example, expanding adoption of non-lethal firearms and safe storage could significantly reduce school shootings and decrease child firearm deaths, suggests research by Harvard Business School Professor Joshua R. Schwartzstein, Harvard University Professor Stefanie Stantcheva, and Stanford University Professor Marcella Alsan.

The team argues that it’s difficult to persuade gun owners to reduce their arsenals. Demand for guns might even grow among non-owners: those interested in acquiring a gun feel the least safe in their daily lives.

Instead, Schwartzstein, the Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration, and his collaborators frame the issue as a trade-off between perceived benefits and costs in the working paper “The Universal Pursuit of Safety, and the Demand for (Lethal, Non-Lethal or No) Guns,” released in March by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Here’s what they learned about gun owners, risk perception, and potential demand for non-lethal weapons.