In the recent renaissance of interest in guns among sociologists, studies of the political conservatism of gun owners have proliferated, but we still know very little about politically liberal gun owners. This despite the fact that one in five U.S. gun owners (some 12 million adults) self‐identifies as liberal. This exploratory study, therefore, seeks to understand what seems on the surface to be an interesting and not rare category in American society: the liberal gun owner. In particular, we seek to answer two questions: Do liberal gun owners differ from other liberals who do not own guns and from other gun owners who are not liberal? We answer these questions using data from the General Social Survey, treating liberal gun owners as a category rather than a point on a continuum. Binary and multinomial logistic regressions suggest ways in which liberal gun owners are a distinct group, more resembling their fellow gun owners in their demographic and geographic backgrounds, but differing from moderate and/or conservative gun owners in important ways, including in their propensity to be hunters, religious affiliation, religiosity, and punitive attitudes.

中文翻译：

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谁是自由枪的拥有者？

在最近社会学家对枪支兴趣的复兴中，对枪支拥有者的政治保守主义的研究激增，但对于政治自由的枪支拥有者，我们仍然知之甚少。尽管事实上有五分之一的美国枪支拥有者（约1200万成年人）自认是自由主义者。因此，这项探索性研究旨在了解表面上看似是美国社会中一个有趣且并非罕见的类别：自由枪支拥有者。特别是，我们试图回答两个问题：自由主义的枪支拥有者是否不同于不拥有枪支的其他自由主义者和不同于非自由主义的其他枪支拥有者？我们使用来自一般社会调查的数据来回答这些问题，将自由枪支拥有者视为一个类别，而不是一个连续统一体上的一个点。