During the COVID-19 pandemic, my father told me he was thinking about buying a gun. Like many Americans, he felt a vague but powerful sense that the social order was on the brink of collapse. His nightly news was filled with stories of hospitals at full capacity, empty shelves at grocery stores, gas shortages and Black Lives Matter protests turning violent. My father had lost his trust in the government’s and the police’s ability to protect him. Increasingly, he feared his fellow Americans.

At a glance, my father looks like the last guy who’d ever want a gun. He is Jewish, an immigrant, a politically liberal city dweller. He didn’t grow up around guns. Most of all, he believed America needed stricter gun control laws. In fact, on many occasions, my father had referred to gun owners as crazy. But I had spent the previous five years studying American gun culture, and I had seen first hand that my father’s position was not so unusual.

The first firearms class I took was in a remote part of central Texas. I had expected to find myself surrounded by men from one of Texas’ many red suburbs or rural towns. Instead, all seven of us had made the two-hour drive from Austin, the state’s liberal bastion. Even more surprising to me: Four students were women.

All were there because they were worried about their safety. These students didn’t seem to want to learn how to shoot a gun; they felt they had no choice but to learn how to shoot a gun. And nationwide, there were many more like them.

The percentage of Americans who own guns has remained mostly stable over the past quarter century, but the reasons people give for owning them have changed strikingly. Up until the late 1990s, people bought guns primarily for hunting or for sport. In 2023, however, the most recent year for which statistics are available, more than 70 percent of gun owners said that a major reason for their owning a gun was protection. Americans now bear arms not for trips into the woods but for trips to the grocery store or to pick up their children from school.

Those gun owners are an increasingly diverse group. Between 2021 and 2024, 11.2 million Americans bought a gun for the first time. Nearly half were women, a fifth were Black and another fifth were Hispanic, much closer to the demographics of the nation as a whole than gun owners of the past. In 2000, only a third of Americans believed having a gun at home made people safer. Today, almost twice as many — a significant majority — express this view.

As the number and the demographics of people who own guns has expanded, so too has our legal right to kill someone in self-defense. Historically, Americans’ right to use lethal force without a duty to retreat was restricted to defending themselves in their homes. But since 2005, “stand your ground” laws, which expand that right to most public spaces, have spread across the country. In my home state of Texas, you can kill someone if you believe it is necessary to prevent them from committing other crimes such as sexual assault or robbery. Texas also allows you to kill someone to recover something that person stole from you, if you “reasonably believe” it’s the only way to get it back.

Throughout my firearms training, my instructors taught us to shoot only when we think our life or the life of a loved one is in danger and that taking down the “bad guy” is the only viable option. They seemed to be counseling restraint — but the list of circumstances they enumerated as life-threatening was far longer than any I would have drawn up previously. As for holding fire, the reasons I was given were rarely about avoiding a terrible mistake or sparing a life, but rather about sparing myself the financial costs, time and stress of an investigation and legal proceedings that could ensue if I pulled the trigger.

Researchers and politicians on the left often cite statistics showing that guns do not make people safer, or that America’s cities are in fact safer now than they have been in a long time. Objectively, these statistics are correct. Research shows that states with higher gun ownership rates usually have higher levels of gun violence; that women who live in a home with a gun face increased risks of violence; that access to firearms greatly increases the risk of suicide, the leading cause of gun death.

What these researchers and politicians don’t seem to get — but my firearm instructors certainly did — is that people don’t experience the world as a statistic. They don’t process risk and safety like a computer.

Owning a gun is an emotional choice and these days, for more and more kinds of Americans, it feels like empowerment. It feels like taking back control in a chaotic world.

It’s a vision of safety as a personal responsibility, not a public good. The political right may have arrived there first, but the left has quickly caught up. It was Kamala Harris, not Donald Trump, who went out of her way during the last presidential election to mention that she owned a Glock and that she would not hesitate to shoot someone who broke into her house.

Seeing all this up close has led me to some ideas that as a liberal academic I would once have considered unthinkable. I still believe it should be harder for people to get their hands on a gun, but to my amazement I now agree with the National Rifle Association that the political left focuses too much on regulation.

For decades, the N.R.A. has said, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” It’s usually referring to criminals or mass shooters — the “bad guy with a gun” who commits homicide in cold blood. The slogan suggests the problem is not the weapon in this criminal’s hands, but rather the person’s mind set, his intention and the culture of violence and lawlessness that produced it.

Make no mistake, the N.R.A. is not saying so in good faith. It isn’t lobbying for policies that could reduce poverty, even though financial desperation can fray communities and push people toward criminal activity, and it isn’t lobbying for better access to mental health care, which could help prevent suicides. Addressing either of those factors could do a lot to lessen gun violence without intruding even a millimeter on the Second Amendment. The organization seeks only to shift scrutiny away from the guns, the organization and the politicians and businesses it supports.

But the N.R.A. is right to say that to understand gun violence, we need to look beyond the guns. Limiting people’s access to them is, for now at least, a political nonstarter. So instead of pathologizing gun owners or telling them they should not be allowed to have weapons, what if we focused on the broader social conditions and cultural contexts that make people — the bad guys and the good guys, too — feel desperate enough to take their own lives, or scared enough that they feel they need to be ready to kill in order to live?

My father didn’t end up buying a gun, and it’s in part because of the conversation we had. I started by listening to his concerns and taking them seriously. I didn’t talk down to him and I didn’t tell him he was wrong. But we talked about how the news media often exaggerate the prevalence of violent crime, and we discussed simpler strategies for keeping safe. That helped him feel more empowered, more in control.

I also told him that through my research about gun owners, I had met many people who turned to guns to feel safer and more empowered but ended up experiencing the opposite. They started to focus more acutely on danger and to see it in more places than they had before.

The more dangerous the world appears to someone with a weapon, the more weapons they may feel they need to have. From the narrow view of a gun sight, danger can appear like a bottomless pit, and safety always out of reach.

Harel Shapira, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, is the author of “Basic Pistol: Living and Dying by the Gun in America,” which will be published next month.

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