Key Points
Question
Do US women’s perceptions of safety vary based on their exposure to guns?
Findings
In this survey study using a nationally representative sample of 1411 women, 41% reported that personally owning a gun would make them safer, and 21% would feel safer if more people could legally carry guns. Perceptions of safety were higher among women who owned guns than those who did not.
Meaning
These findings indicate a need for gun violence reduction interventions to consider different safety perceptions related to gun exposure.
This survey study examines perceptions of safety related to firearm ownership among women in the US.
Abstract
Importance
Prior research found differences in the perceived safety benefits from firearm exposure among diverse gun owners. More women have bought firearms in recent years, resulting in a growing proportion of women who own guns.
Objective
To examine differences in perceptions of safety among US women, including women who personally own firearms.
Design, Setting, and Participants
This descriptive survey study used data from the nationally representative National Survey of Gun Policy, fielded January 6 to 24, 2025. Participants included members of the AmeriSpeak panel who were invited to, and completed, the survey (survey completion rate, 69.8%; N = 2977) online or by telephone in English or Spanish. This study focused specifically on women respondents.
Exposures
Women respondents were stratified by whether they personally owned a gun, lived in a home with a gun that did not belong to them, or had no guns in the home.
Main Outcomes and Measures
The main outcome was differences in respondents affirming whether “personally owning a gun will make me safer” and “I would feel safer if more people were allowed to legally carry guns.” These perceptions were also examined across racial and ethnic subgroups of gun-owning women and by whether protection in or out of the home were important reasons for ownership. Differences were assessed using survey-weighted logistic regression models.
Results
A total of 1411 women completed the survey. The mean (SE) age of women respondents was 48.4 (0.6) years; 12.8% self-identified as non-Hispanic Black, 17.4% as Hispanic, 60.3% as non-Hispanic White, and 9.5% as non-Hispanic other race. Overall, 41.1% (95% CI, 37.7%-44.4%) of women affirmed that personally owning a gun would make them safer, and 21.3% (95% CI, 18.5%-24.0%) agreed they would feel safer if more people were allowed to legally carry guns. Affirmations were significantly higher among gun-owning women (69.7% [95% CI, 63.0%-76.3%] and 35.3% [95% CI, 28.6%-42.0%], respectively), compared with those living in homes with guns (48.9% [95% CI, 40.6%-57.1%] and 22.2% [95% CI, 15.1%-29.3%]) and gun-free homes (26.0% [95% CI, 22.5%-29.6%] and 14.8% [95% CI, 11.9%-17.8%]). Among gun owners, agreement with perceived safety gains from ownership ranged from 63.2% (95% CI, 36.7%-89.8%) among non-Hispanic other to 72.6% (95% CI, 56.1%-89.1%) among Hispanic respondents, and perceived safety from others carrying from 20.1% (95% CI, 9.4%-30.9%) among Black to 40.5% (95% CI, 13.4%-67.6%) among non-Hispanic other respondents, with no significant differences by racial and ethnic groups. There were no significant differences when comparing those who did vs did not report that protection in the home or out of the home were important reasons for ownership.
Conclusions and Relevance
In this survey study of US women, more than half of overall respondents perceived they would not feel safer with greater exposure to firearms, although results varied by personal gun ownership. As gun ownership diversifies, these findings highlight the importance of attending to perceptions of safety in discussions of interventions to reduce gun violence.
Introduction
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and its corresponding surge in first-time gun owners, gun ownership has diversified to include more racial and ethnic minorities and women.1 This corresponds with a shift toward protective reasons for gun ownership across a broad range of contexts.2,3 Among gun owners, the majority of whom own firearms for protection, asking them whether personally owning a gun makes them safer is akin to asking if their safety-related motivations for owning a gun have been met. Previous research has found differences among gun owners from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds on their perceptions of whether personally owning a gun would make them safer; only 60% of Black and Hispanic gun owners, compared with 79% of White gun owners, affirmed.4
More research has been done in recent years2,5,6; however, generally less attention has been paid specifically to women who own guns or live in homes with guns. Recent research on reasons for gun ownership found differences between men and women. While protection in and out of the home were the most commonly reported reasons for ownership among both women (89% and 86%, respectively) and men (91% and 82%, respectively), women reported owning guns for hunting (66%) and recreation (81%) at significantly lower rates than men (77% and 90%, respectively).7 Yet it is unclear whether potential safety-related motivations for gun ownership among women are being realized.
There has been both increasing gun ownership and a growing proportion of gun owners who are women. There has also been focused marketing efforts for gun ownership for women focusing on safety.8 This study sought to understand perceptions of safety related to personal firearm ownership and exposure to others carrying in public among subgroups of women. We explored differences by demographics, gun ownership status, and reasons for ownership among women who reported personally owning guns.
Methods
We fielded the 2025 wave of the National Survey of Gun Policy using NORC’s AmeriSpeak Panel from January 6 to 24, 2025. AmeriSpeak panel members complete written informed consent when registering for the panel. A subset of members is invited to complete a particular survey; survey completion is voluntary. NORC is a Charter Member of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) Transparency Initiative. We followed the AAPOR best practices in reporting guidelines,9 and a transparency report for data collection is available upon request. This survey study was reviewed and determined to not be human participant research by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health institutional review board.
This nationally representative survey could be completed online or by telephone and was available in both English and Spanish. We oversampled Asian American, Black American, and Hispanic American respondents. Respondents’ race and ethnicity were self-identified through the demographic panel. We categorized gun ownership into 3 categories: (1) personal ownership (guns in the home that personally belong to you); (2) household possession (guns in the home that do not personally belong to you); and (3) gun-free households. Respondents reported their level of agreement with the statements “personally owning a gun will make me safer” and “I would feel safer if more people were allowed to legally carry guns.” Responses were provided on a 5-point Likert Scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree. Agree and strongly agree were combined to create a dichotomous measure of agreement for each statement. We also asked respondents to rate the importance of different reasons for ownership; respondents could identify multiple reasons as important. For this study, we focused on whether protection in the home or protection out of the home were rated as extremely important reasons for ownership in the context of the perceived safety benefits questions. We restricted our sample to women to better understand this growing gun owning demographic. While overall results were presented for all women in the sample, the analysis primarily focused on perspectives of women who own guns. Recognizing that neutral responses are different from disagreement, we also ran the analysis with 3 groups: (1) strongly agree and agree, (2) neither agree nor disagree, and (3) disagree and strongly disagree. Finally, we ran the analysis using the 5-point Likert scale to show the full range of responses. Also recognizing that other demographic characteristics of the women in the sample could influence their responses, we generated probabilities of affirming the perceived safety benefits questions.
Statistical Analysis
We generated weighted proportions using the survey package in R, version 4.5.0 (R Foundation) for nationally representative estimates of US gun owners. Data are presented as the percentage of respondents providing an affirmative response with 95% CIs. We assessed differences between groups using survey-weighted logistic regression models. To obtain all pairwise comparisons across groups, we ran separate models with each group as the reference. We then applied a Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons for each analysis, setting the significant threshold at P < .017. As a stability check, we also estimated percentage-point differences between groups using the delta method via svycontrast; both methods produced consistent conclusions.
Results
Our sample of 1411 women respondents included 323 reporting personal ownership, 216 reporting household possession (ie, living in a home with a gun but not the owner), and 872 reporting a gun-free household (Table 1). The mean (SE) age of women respondents was 48.4 (0.6) years; 12.8% self-identified as non-Hispanic Black, 17.4% as Hispanic, 60.3% as non-Hispanic White, and 9.5% as non-Hispanic other race. Figure 1 presents the affirmative responses to perceptions of safety among women overall and by gun ownership status. Overall, 41.1% (95% CI, 37.7%-44.4%) of women reported believing that personally owning a gun would make them safer, and 21.3% (95% CI, 18.5%-24.0%) reported they would feel safer if more people were allowed to legally carry guns. There were significant differences across the 3 ownership strata regarding personal safety improvements related to gun ownership: 69.7% (95% CI, 63.0%-76.3%) of gun-owning women affirmed that owning a gun would make them safer, compared with 48.9% (95% CI, 40.6%-57.1%) of household possessors and 26.0% (95% CI, 22.5%-29.6%) of women living in gun-free households. In response to feeling safer if more people were allowed to legally carry guns, a significantly higher percentage of gun owners compared with women in gun-free households affirmed (35.3% [95% CI, 28.6%-42.0%] vs 14.8% [95% CI, 11.9%-17.8%]), respectively. Table 2 presents the results as percentage-point differences from the delta method and logistic regression along with the Bonferroni correction.
Table 1. Demographics Characteristics of Women in the Survey Samplea.
| Characteristic | Weighted % (95% CI) | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall (N = 1411) | Gun owner (n = 323) | Nonowner | ||
| Guns in home (n = 216) | No guns (n = 872) | |||
| Age, mean (SE), y | 48.4 (0.6) | 48.8 (1.3) | 49.4 (1.5) | 48.0 (0.8) |
| Race and ethnicity | ||||
| Black, non-Hispanic | 12.8 (11.2-14.5) | 14.7 (11.4-18.9) | 7.2 (4.5-11.3) | 13.6 (11.5-15.9) |
| Hispanic | 17.4 (15.3-19.8) | 8.5 (5.9-12.1) | 13.9 (9.7-19.7) | 22.4 (19.3-25.9) |
| White, non-Hispanic | 60.3 (57.2-63.4) | 71.7 (65.8-76.9) | 74.9 (68.1-80.6) | 50.9 (46.6-55.2) |
| Other, non-Hispanicb | 9.5 (7.9-11.5) | 5.1 (2.8-9.0) | 4.0 (2.1-7.4) | 13.1 (10.7-16.1) |
| Educational attainment | ||||
| Less than HS | 3.6 (2.6-4.9) | 1.7 (0.8-3.4) | 2.9 (1.1-7.6) | 4.7 (3.2-6.7) |
| HS graduate | 24.4 (21.5-27.5) | 25.0 (19.1-31.9) | 22.8 (16.3-30.8) | 24.6 (21.0-28.7) |
| Some college/associate degree | 37.1 (34.0-40.4) | 42.7 (35.8-50.0) | 38.4 (31.0-46.4) | 34.2 (30.4-38.2) |
| Bachelor’s degree | 20.7 (18.0-23.6) | 19.3 (14.1-25.8) | 19.9 (14.2-27.3) | 21.5 (18.1-25.4) |
| Postgraduate or professional degree | 14.3 (12.0-16.8) | 11.3 (7.7-16.4) | 16.0 (10.6-23.4) | 15.0 (12.1-18.5) |
| Annual income | ||||
| <$30 000 | 20.7 (18.3-23.4) | 20.3 (15.2-26.6) | 10.8 (6.8-16.8) | 23.9 (20.7-27.5) |
| $30 000 to <$60 000 | 27.4 (24.6-30.4) | 25.0 (19.3-31.6) | 30.5 (23.5-38.5) | 27.6 (24.0-31.5) |
| $60 000 to <$100 000 | 24.4 (21.6-27.6) | 32.1 (25.6-39.4) | 24.5 (18.2-32.2) | 21.0 (17.6-24.9) |
| ≥$100 000 | 27.4 (24.4-30.7) | 22.6 (17.1-29.3) | 34.2 (26.8-42.4) | 27.5 (23.6-31.8) |
| Employment status | ||||
| Working—as a paid employee | 53.5 (50.1-56.9) | 54.9 (47.7-62.0) | 50.8 (42.7-58.9) | 53.7 (49.4-58.0) |
| Working—self-employed | 7.8 (6.2-9.8) | 9.6 (6.2-14.6) | 8.2 (4.9-13.3) | 7.0 (5.1-9.5) |
| Not working—on temporary layoff | 0.9 (0.5-1.9) | 1.1 (0.2-5.5) | 1.3 (0.3-5.9) | 0.7 (0.3-1.5) |
| Not working—looking for work | 3.7 (2.7-5.2) | 0.6 (0.2-2.0) | 2.4 (1.0-5.5) | 5.5 (3.8-7.9) |
| Not working—retired | 18.9 (16.5-21.7) | 18.0 (13.7-23.3) | 22.2 (16.3-29.6) | 18.3 (15.1-22.0) |
| Not working—disabled | 6.1 (4.8-7.9) | 5.6 (3.3-9.3) | 3.1 (1.4-6.8) | 7.3 (5.4-9.8) |
| Not working—other | 9.0 (7.1-11.3) | 10.2 (6.0-16.8) | 11.9 (7.2-19.0) | 7.5 (5.5-10.0) |
| Geographic region | ||||
| Northeast | 15.5 (13.0-18.4) | 11.6 (7.5-17.6) | 11.5 (6.9-18.5) | 18.5 (15.0-22.5) |
| Midwest | 22.1 (19.5-24.8) | 22.1 (16.8-28.4) | 24.2 (18.1-31.5) | 21.4 (18.3-24.9) |
| South | 38.9 (35.6-42.3) | 53.8 (46.6-60.8) | 32.3 (25.2-40.4) | 34.3 (30.4-38.5) |
| West | 23.5 (20.8-26.4) | 12.5 (9.1-17.0) | 32.0 (24.8-40.2) | 25.8 (22.3-29.8) |
| Metropolitan status | ||||
| Nonmetropolitan | 13.8 (11.6-16.4) | 21.7 (15.9-28.8) | 15.9 (11.1-22.3) | 9.7 (7.5-12.5) |
| Metropolitan | 86.2 (83.6-88.4) | 78.3 (71.2-84.1) | 84.1 (77.7-88.9) | 90.3 (87.5-92.5) |
| Marital status | ||||
| Married | 50.1 (46.7-53.4) | 55.8 (48.4-62.9) | 76.8 (68.9-83.3) | 39.4 (35.2-43.7) |
| Widowed | 4.8 (3.5-6.5) | 7.9 (4.6-13.3) | 0.4 (0.1-1.3) | 4.7 (3.3-6.7) |
| Divorced | 12.1 (10.1-14.3) | 11.9 (8.1-17.0) | 5.2 (2.6-10.1) | 14.2 (11.6-17.4) |
| Separated | 4.7 (3.5-6.3) | 3.4 (1.5-7.5) | 1.3 (0.3-5.2) | 6.3 (4.5-8.7) |
| Never married | 28.4 (25.4-31.6) | 21.0 (15.2-28.4) | 16.2 (10.7-23.8) | 35.3 (31.3-39.6) |
| Presence of children | ||||
| Children in home | 30.1 (27.1-33.3) | 31.7 (25.2-38.9) | 32.3 (25.3-40.2) | 28.7 (25.0-32.7) |
| No children in home | 69.9 (66.7-72.9) | 68.3 (61.1-74.8) | 67.7 (59.8-74.7) | 71.3 (67.3-75.0) |
| Responses to reasons for ownership | ||||
| Protection in the home extremely important | NA | 54.8 (47.5-61.9) | NA | NA |
| Protection outside the home extremely important | NA | 35.2 (28.4-42.7) | NA | NA |
Abbreviations: HS, high school; NA, not applicable.
Values are survey-weighted percentages. Age is presented as weighted mean. Overall estimates are weighted using a general population weight for all respondents from the total sample. Estimates by gun ownership status are weighted using a weight calibrated for gun ownership status comparisons from the total sample. Protection-related reasons for ownership are restricted to women who personally own firearms and are not applicable for other ownership groups. Lower confidence interval bounds below zero were truncated to zero.
Cannot be broken down further.
Figure 1. Bar Graph of Affirmative Responses for Perceptions of Safety Among Women Overall and by Gun Ownership Status.
Table 2. Pairwise Differencesa.
| Comparison | Owning a gun makes me safer | Safer if more could legally carry | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Difference, pp (95% CI) | Delta method P value | Logistic regression P value | Significant (Bonferroni P < .017) | Difference, pp (95% CI) | Delta method P value | Logistic regression P value | Significant (Bonferroni P < .017) | |
| Figure 1 (by gun ownership status) | ||||||||
| Owner vs guns-in-home not owner | 20.8 (10.2 to 31.4) | <.001 | <.001 | Yes | 13.1 (3.3 to 22.9) | .009 | .01 | Yes |
| Owner vs no guns in home | 43.6 (36.0 to 51.2) | <.001 | <.001 | Yes | 20.5 (13.1 to 27.8) | <.001 | <.001 | Yes |
| Guns-in-home not owner vs no guns in home | 22.8 (13.8 to 31.8) | <.001 | <.001 | Yes | 7.3 (−0.3 to 15.1) | .06 | .04 | No |
| Figure 2 (by race and ethnicity among female gun owners) | ||||||||
| White vs Black | 6.4 (−8.3 to 21.1) | .40 | .39 | No | 18.8 (4.9 to 32.6) | .01 | .02 | Nob |
| White vs Hispanic | −1.8 (−20.4 to 16.8) | .85 | .85 | No | 8.9 (−9.9 to 27.7) | .35 | .38 | No |
| Black vs Hispanic | −8.2 (−28.6 to 12.2) | .43 | .45 | No | −9.9 (−29.6 to 9.9) | .33 | .32 | No |
Abbreviation: pp, percentage points.
Bonferroni correction was applied for 3 pairwise comparisons (α = 0.05/3 = 0.017). Both methods agreed on almost all comparisons.
This outcome was nominally significant by the delta method (P = .008) but was not significant after Bonferroni correction by logistic regression (P = .02).
Figure 2 presents the affirmative responses among racial and ethnic subgroups of gun-owning women. Among gun-owning women, affirmative responses ranged from 63.2% (95% CI, 36.7%-89.8%) among non-Hispanic other to 72.6% (95% CI, 56.1%-89.1%) among Hispanic respondents for personally owning a gun making them safer and from 20.1% (95% CI, 9.4%-30.9%) among Black to 40.5% (95% CI, 13.4%-67.6%) among non-Hispanic other respondents for feeling safer if more people could legally carry. There were no statistically significant differences for either perspective of safety across demographic subgroups. Table 2 presents the results as percentage-point differences from the delta method and logistic regression, along with the Bonferroni correction for Figure 1 and Figure 2.
Figure 2. Bar Graph of Affirmative Responses for Perceptions of Safety Among Gun Owning Women by Race and Ethnicity.
Figure 3 presents the affirmative responses to perceptions of safety among gun-owning women by whether protection in the home or protection out of the home were rated as extremely important reasons for ownership. There were no significant differences among gun-owning women affirming that personally owning a gun would make them safer or that they would feel safer if more people could legally carry by reasons for gun ownership. However, there were generally higher levels of affirmation for safety improvements for personal ownership than if more people could legally carry. Compared with gun-owning women overall, those who said protection in or out of the home were important reasons for ownership had higher proportions affirming perceptions of safety (Figure 3 vs Figure 1).
Figure 3. Bar Graph of Affirmative Responses for Perceptions of Safety Among Gun Owning Women by Reasons for Ownership.
Findings from the 3-group and full Likert scale analysis suggest a greater proportion of neutral responses among gun-owning women than non-owners (eTables 1 and 2 in Supplement 1). When examining the full 5-point Likert scale, affirmation among gun-owning women was driven by more respondents selecting “strongly agree” than among the other groups (eFigures 1 and 2 in Supplement 1). Findings from the estimated probabilities show the same pattern of findings, indicating that differences across groups were not explained by demographic characteristics (eTable 3 in Supplement 1).
Discussion
Overall, fewer than half of the women in this survey study reported that personally owning a gun would make them safer, and only one-fifth reported they would feel safer if more people could legally carry guns. The proportion affirmative for personal ownership making them safer was much higher for gun-owning women (70%); however, affirmative responses for feeling safer if more people could legally carry remained low among gun-owning women (35%).
Despite low perceptions of safety for others carrying firearms in public, there has been a national shift toward removing regulations and requirements for concealed carry. In the 1980s, few states allowed for broad public carry. By 2025, 29 states had removed the requirement to obtain a license to carry a loaded, concealed handgun in public.10 This shift is in direct contrast to public opinion; fewer than one-quarter of US adults, including only 37% of gun owners, support allowing individuals to carry without a permit.11 Lower perceptions of safety among women if more people could legally carry is further evidence that public policy is inconsistent with public attitudes, even among gun owners.
There is a common narrative promoted by the gun industry that the best way for women to keep themselves safe is to buy a gun.8 This is often framed in the context of danger from an unknown “other,” yet an analysis of homicides found that 92% of female victims knew their male attacker.12 Additionally, approximately 90% of female victims of rape knew their attacker.13 Women may be more likely than men to be empowered by gun ownership,14 and, among victims of intimate partner violence, some women have reported higher perceptions that gun ownership would decrease the likelihood of future victimization.15 This perception is contrary to evidence that the presence of firearms increases the risk of firearm injury and death.16,17,18 More work needs to be done to understand the situations in which firearms may be dangerous or protective, or at least perceived to be, to support informed decision making with regard to firearm ownership.
Contrary to prior research,4 we did not find significant differences in perceptions of safety among gun-owning women of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Prior research focused on gun ownership overall, so perhaps the differences previously seen were driven by gun-owning men. Additionally, that prior study was conducted in 2021; the context of COVID-19, the murder of George Floyd, and growing national discourse on issues of social justice may have influenced those results. Future research should explore whether there are temporal changes in perceptions of safety within demographic subgroups as well as potential differences in determinants of gun owners’ views on safety across these subgroups.
Limitations
This study’s findings should be considered in the context of some limitations. Sampling bias may have affected our results; however, the AmeriSpeak panel uses probability-based sampling to help minimize this bias. The sample size for non-Hispanic other race was small and therefore excluded from the analysis. This prevented us from making inferences about this group. We focused most of our analysis on gun-owning women. Women who live in homes with guns owned by someone else are often grouped with women in gun-free homes, which may have implications for how issues of gun safety resonate with that group. Future work should more closely examine perceptions and attitudes among these women. Additionally, our survey weight for gun ownership was for all gun owners, not specifically gun-owning women, which could have influenced our findings. However, our results were stable when applying the general population weight, reflecting that results were based on within-group proportions and were not sensitive to differences in population weighting. Finally, we do not have data on gun-owning women’s views on personal safety from gun ownership prior to owning a firearm. Future research should explore whether perceptions of safety change after individuals acquire a firearm.
Conclusions
This survey study explored US women’s perceptions of safety derived from personal firearm ownership and more people legally carrying firearms. Larger proportions of gun-owning women reported higher endorsement of both views on safety compared with women in gun-free households. Within subgroups, women consistently reported greater perceptions of safety from personal gun ownership than from more people legally carrying firearms; more than twice as many gun-owning women said personally owning a gun would make them safer than would other people carrying guns in public. When discussing interventions to reduce gun violence, perceptions of safety must be part of the conversation.
eTable 1. Three-category distribution of perceptions of safety from firearm ownership and public carry among women, by gun ownership status and race and ethnicity
eFigure 1. Distribution of responses to (A) “Owning a gun makes me safer” and (B) “I would feel safer if more people were allowed to legally carry guns,” among women, by household firearm access status
eTable 2. Three-category distribution of perceived safety from firearm ownership and public carry among gun-Owning women, by reasons for ownership
eFigure 2. Distribution of responses to (A) “Owning a gun makes me safer” and (B) “I would feel safer if more people were allowed to legally carry guns,” among gun-owning women, by race/ethnicity
eTable 3. Affirmative responses from adjusted predicted probabilities for perceptions of safety among women overall and by gun ownership status
Data Sharing Statement
References
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Associated Data
This section collects any data citations, data availability statements, or supplementary materials included in this article.
Supplementary Materials
eTable 1. Three-category distribution of perceptions of safety from firearm ownership and public carry among women, by gun ownership status and race and ethnicity
eFigure 1. Distribution of responses to (A) “Owning a gun makes me safer” and (B) “I would feel safer if more people were allowed to legally carry guns,” among women, by household firearm access status
eTable 2. Three-category distribution of perceived safety from firearm ownership and public carry among gun-Owning women, by reasons for ownership
eFigure 2. Distribution of responses to (A) “Owning a gun makes me safer” and (B) “I would feel safer if more people were allowed to legally carry guns,” among gun-owning women, by race/ethnicity
eTable 3. Affirmative responses from adjusted predicted probabilities for perceptions of safety among women overall and by gun ownership status
Data Sharing Statement
