Julio Piloto, owner of General Gun Shop, left, shows customer Pedro Silva, of Homestead, Fla., right, a Glock 19 at a gun show held by Florida Gun Shows, Saturday, Jan. 9, 2016, in Miami. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky)

The political divide between Americans who own guns and Americans who don’t has widened over the last 40 years, according to a recent study out of the University of Kansas that also found gun owners are more likely to support Republican candidates than their nongun-owning counterparts.

The findings, recently published in Social Science Quarterly, confirm “what a lot of people probably thought,” said Mark Joslyn, a professor of political science at KU and the study’s lead author. In the past, academic research has mostly focused on “what guns do,” Joslyn said, usually exploring connections between violence and the availability of guns.

But in their study, Joslyn and his colleagues — KU political science professor Don Haider-Markel, along with political science graduate students Michael Baggs and Andrew Bilbo — wanted to examine the voting patterns of gun owners, taking a closer look at how guns shape our political identities.

“As a predictor of vote choice, gun ownership is extremely consistent,” Joslyn said. “It was a major predictor in every election since 1972, and it tends to outperform conventional measures that we always use, say, in terms of differences between men and women in their choice of candidates, or education or income.”

In their research, Joslyn and his colleagues examined data from the General Social Survey spanning 1972 to 2012. The survey of presidential election voters included questions about gun ownership, including if the respondent lived in a home with a gun and if he or she owned that gun.

Many gun owners, Joslyn said, share a close attachment to values such as individualism (i.e., personal responsibility and self-reliance) and freedom, specifically the freedom from government intrusion in their daily lives. These beliefs also intersect with America’s “long history” of gun ownership, he said, which includes hunting.

“There are traditions passed through families; there are values that exist across this group,” Joslyn said. “And many of these values sit consistently with a conservative ideology in the Republican Party.”

Mark Joslyn

Conversely, “it’s harder to define” the nongun-owning bloc, Joslyn said, especially in recent years.

But his research also found that owning a gun increased the likelihood of voting for a Republican candidate, independent of other factors such as party identification, ideology, race, gender, education and age. Around the time of the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections, Joslyn noted, more and more people who didn’t own guns began shifting toward the Democratic Party. The arrival of the Great Recession around 2008, he speculates, may have also been a factor in this shift.

The divide between gun-owning Americans and their nongun-owning-peers has grown substantially since 1972, Joslyn and his colleagues found, with the disparity peaking around Barack Obama’s 2012 victory.

“I think there are strong reactions on both sides,” Joslyn said of recent debates surrounding issues such as gun control. “Gun owners want the right to own their guns in all sorts of different ways. Nongun owners react just as strongly, except in the opposite fashion.”

Those who don’t own guns have mobilized in recent years against those who do, Joslyn said, because “they don’t see guns in the same way.” Gun owners typically view their weapons as safety devices, while nongun owners often regard them as threatening, Joslyn theorized.

But more research needs to be done in exploring the perception of guns across both groups, Joslyn said. Depending on the data, he said, anywhere from one-third to 40 percent of the population are gun owners.

“There’s all sorts of other studies that can be done to show how guns matter,” Joslyn said.

“Guns are not just a possession — it’s an identity. Once you have a gun, you belong to a group, and that group has identifiable traits and it’s somewhat predictable how it might vote,” he said. “And we need to pay more attention to that group.”