On the role of economic hardship in gun acquisition in the United States.

Gun-related violence in the U.S. threatens public health and strains the healthcare system. Prior work suggests that self-protection is a key driver of gun prevalence in the U.S., whereby Americans seek to acquire a gun when they fear that they themselves or their loved ones may be at risk of violence. The more the gun homicides take place in a city, the stronger the tendency to own a gun by its residents. While it is tenable that economic conditions may modulate the strength of this association, we know little about how economic hardship shapes gun ownership in the U.S. Leveraging mutual information and time-series symbolization, and considering suicides with firearms as a proxy of gun prevalence, we examine how economic indicators modify the association between gun homicides and gun prevalence using a cross-sectional comparison of 884 metropolitan/micropolitan statistical areas in the U.S. and a temporal analysis of national monthly trends. Across these areas, gun prevalence rises roughly twice as fast with gun homicides in high income-inequality settings. Nationally, gun homicide-gun prevalence association emerges only when Economic Policy Uncertainty changes are sufficiently large. These findings suggest that reducing inequality and elevating economic confidence past a critical threshold may dampen gun prevalence and help mitigate public-health impacts of gun violence.