Is IQ related to gun possession and/or gun support?

Note: This is a section of a longer article. To go to the start, click here.

IQ is related to support for stricter gun laws, but not to actual gun possession. To investigate this question, we asked our participants two questions: a) whether they possess guns and b) whether they think that the gun control laws should be more or less strict. The correlation between IQ and gun possession was essentially zero (r = -0.02, n = 661).. The correlation between IQ and support for stricter gun laws was stronger, and this time significant both in statistical and practical terms, r = 0.22 (n = 661). This means that people with higher IQs think that gun laws should be stricter than they currently are. 

We decided to check what would happen to the relationship between IQ and support for stricter gun laws if we statistically control for political ideology (i.e, where a person falls on the left-to-right political spectrum). It is possible that political ideology accounts for the relationship between IQ and gun attitudes in a sense that higher IQ people are more progressive and this is what drives their support for gun control. Thus, if we statistically control for political ideology, the relationship between IQ and gun laws support should disappear or diminish. That is exactly what happened - once we accounted for ideology, the correlation between IQ and support for stricter gun laws was essentially cut in half to r = 0.11 (n = 661). 

Two scatterplots below show these relationships, first one without and second one with political ideology as a control variable. 

What do the other studies say?

While we did not manage to find studies that specifically examined the link between IQ and gun attitudes, there are studies that investigated how the education level (which is positively related to IQ and sometimes taken as a proxy for IQ) is related to gun ownership and support. These studies generally find that higher education levels are associated with lower gun ownership and greater support for gun control measures (Ross, 2001; Kleck, 1996; Oraka et al., 2019). 

Takeaways

• Higher IQ people would like to see stricter gun laws compared to people with lower IQs.

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