I found this article posted at WWW.STURMGEWEHR.COM by grant http://www.sturmgewehr.com/webBBS/general.cgi?read=11256. I know my nieghbor bought a Baretta 92F because he was afraid that he couldn't buy one in the future.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29222-2001Jul20.html
washington Post.com: In Guns We Trust
By Richard Morin
Sunday, July 22, 2001; Page B05
We all know why so many law-abiding Americans own guns: Some buy them for
protection against crime. Others collect them as objets d'art. Some love to hunt
or target shoot.
But two Ohio State University researchers argue there's another significant
factor behind America's infatuation with firearms: Many Americans who own guns
don't trust the federal government.
Sociology professors Robert M. Jiobu and Timothy J. Curry assert that this
mistrust complicates government efforts to control the sale and possession of
guns. In fact, they suggest that gun control laws may have exactly the opposite
effect: "To mandate decreased gun ownership through gun control legislation may
only encourage those people who have little faith in the government to stockpile
weapons," they claim in the latest issue of Social Science Quarterly.
Curry and Jiobu analyzed data collected between 1988 and 1996 from the General
Social Survey (GSS), the nation's most closely watched barometer of social
trends. The survey included questions about gun ownership and three questions
that asked how much confidence people have in the executive branch of
government, in the Supreme Court and in Congress.
Overall, the researchers found that 44 percent of the more than 6,000
respondents had "hardly any" confidence in at least one of the government
branches -- "significantly more than expressed similar levels of mistrust in the
1960s," Curry said.
They also found that those who mistrusted all branches of the federal government
were significantly more likely to own a gun (37 percent) than those who trusted
all three (23 percent) -- a finding that remained strong even after they
controlled for relevant variables such as political ideology, gender, age,
education, general fear of crime, whether the respondents had been crime victims
in the previous year, whether they or someone in their household hunted, what
region of the country they lived in and whether they lived in a city, in the
suburbs or in a rural area.
"If a policy goal of the federal government is to decrease gun ownership among
the general population, then our results suggest that increasing trust in
government ought to be an equally important goal," Jiobu and Curry wrote.