Jan Dizard, 77, a professor emeritus at Amherst College who splits time between western Massachusetts and California, is a registered Democrat and a self-described environmentalist. He’s also a life-long gun owner who patronizes both his local rod and gun club and bird dog association.
Although Dizard acknowledges that he’s “by far the furthest left [politically] of anybody in the club,” being a liberal gun owner hardly makes him a unicorn.
If a left-leaning gun owner seems unusual, it’s in part because there are critical gaps in our nation’s collective understanding about who owns firearms in America and what they use them for.
Dizard stands in contrast to the 87,000 Americans at last weekend’s record-breaking annual NRA conference, where attendees told a HuffPost reporter that the media focuses a disproportionate amount of coverage on gun violence[1] and ignores positive stories about firearms. “They are censoring what the true pulse of the citizenry thinks,” said Brian Lilly, 49, who attended the conference for the first time this year with his 18-year-old son.
Outside of that core pro-NRA group, however, identifying as a gun owner can be politically fraught. In pockets of the country, some owners don’t feel comfortable revealing their status[2] at all. And a dearth of scientific research on guns and gun ownership ― thanks in part to lobbying efforts conducted by the NRA[3] ― contributes to our national ignorance about who owns guns and why.
The best estimates put the number of guns in America at about 300 million, which are owned by an estimated 32 to 42 percent of Americans, according to polls by Pew
