Existing scholarship usually presents people’s attitudes about guns as fixed and fully formed. Rarely are such attitudes examined as the outcome of social processes. As a result, while we know a great deal about what people think about guns, we know very little about the development of these beliefs. In this paper, we use a combination of surveys and life history interviews with a national sample of college students between the ages of 18 and 24 to examine how attitudes about guns develop in childhood and young adulthood. We find that while family gun ownership matters, positive attitudes about guns develop through active socialization that continues beyond childhood and is not reducible to family background. Relationships play a key role in this process, with changes in relationships often driving changes in attitudes about guns. Changes in attitudes about guns can take place in terms of both the content (what young adults think about guns) and the form (how young adults think about guns). In the transition to young adulthood, attitudes about guns develop from being articulated primarily as personal experiences connected to the activity of shooting guns or experiencing gun violence, to being articulated as political beliefs, connected to issues of regulation. These findings contribute to our understanding of gun attitudes by offering insights on not only what people think about guns but also how people come to think about guns in the ways that they do.

现有的学术研究通常将人们对枪支的态度呈现为固定的和完全成型的。很少有人将这种态度作为社会过程的结果来考察。因此，虽然我们对人们对枪支的看法了解很多，但我们对这些信念的发展知之甚少。在本文中，我们将调查和生活史访谈相结合，对 18 至 24 岁的全国大学生样本进行调查，以研究儿童和青年时期对枪支的态度是如何发展的。我们发现，虽然家庭拥有枪支很重要，但对枪支的积极态度是通过积极的社会化发展起来的，这种社会化会持续到童年之后，并且不能归结为家庭背景。人际关系在这个过程中起着关键作用，人际关系的变化往往会推动人们对枪支的态度发生变化。对枪支的态度的变化可以发生在内容（年轻人对枪支的看法）和形式（年轻人对枪支的看法）方面。在向青年过渡的过程中，人们对枪支的态度从主要表述为与开枪活动或经历枪支暴力相关的个人经历，被表达为政治信仰，与监管问题相关。这些发现不仅提供了人们对枪支的看法，而且还提供了人们如何以他们的方式看待枪支的见解，从而有助于我们对枪支态度的理解。