Guns are more prevalent than ever in the United States. By one estimate, the number of civilian-owned firearms in the U.S. exceeds the country’s population. The ubiquity of guns in the U.S. carries implications for students and educators.
For example, some commentators and policy makers have proposed that educators carry guns in schools to protect themselves and their students. Further, several states explicitly permit the possession of guns on college campuses. But crucial questions relevant to the prevalence of guns remain unanswered. For instance, what exactly are the psychological consequences of being around all these guns?
The Weapons Effect
One of the most well-studied psychological consequences of being around guns concerns the “weapons effect,” which refers to the idea that the presence of guns promotes aggression. In 1967, Berkowitz and LePage conducted a foundational study in which 100 male college students had the opportunity to administer electric shocks to a peer who had provoked them. In one condition, a shotgun and a revolver sat on a table near the shock key. In the other condition, there were no weapons in sight. Participants administered more shocks in the presence of guns, setting the stage for years of studies on the weapons effect.
Naturally, most of those studies measured aggression-related outcomes, but other potential consequences have remained unexamined. We initiated a program of research to investigate previously untested consequences of being in the presence of a gun. Our initial research has focused on the following question: How does being around guns influence attention?
Guns as Threatening Stimuli
Threats in the environment tend to increase arousal and distract attention away from other tasks or goals. It seems reasonable to consider guns as potent threats to safety and wellbeing. Nearly 47,000 people died from gun-related injuries in the United States in 2023. In that same year, about 80% of all murders in the country involved a firearm.
Experiences of psychological trauma and nonfatal injuries associated with gun violence are even more prevalent than gun-related deaths. And the number of school shootings in the U.S. set frightening new records each year from 2021 to 2023. With those alarming figures in mind, we wondered how putting even more guns into even more academic spaces might influence students’ ability to pay attention.
Guns and Attention
According to attention control theory, anxiety-inducing threats tend to increase attention to the threatening stimulus and thereby reduce goal-directed attention. For example, one study found that participants performing a visual search task were slower to find the first target in the presence of threatening distractor images. Another study found that attention orients toward threatening stimuli even if attending to the threat triggers an aversive outcome.
Similarly, research on “weapons focus” has found that weapons capture attention and impair memory of contextual details surrounding the weapon. Those past studies provide compelling evidence that, despite being motivated to avoid them, individuals may be unable to ignore threatening stimuli.
Testing the Effects of Gun Presence on Attention
We reasoned that, if a gun functions as a threat in the environment, then the presence of guns in academic spaces may undermine students’ ability to pay attention to current tasks. In two laboratory experiments, we tested the hypothesis that being in the presence of a gun distracts attention away from and reduces performance on validated cognitive tests. To be sure, whether the presence of guns distracts attention away from other tasks was not a foregone conclusion, as some studies have found null effects of threatening stimuli on task performance.
In the first experiment, students completed cognitive tests that required careful attention to task-relevant stimuli while ignoring distracting or irrelevant information. Students completed these tests of attention control in the presence of either a highly realistic (but fake) M1911 handgun or an unassuming Swingline stapler. The two objects were placed in the same location—about 5 feet away from the participants’ workstation—and the stapler was roughly the same color and size as the gun, which made the stapler an ideal non-threatening comparison object.
We found that students performed worse on the attention control tests in the presence of a gun. We then replicated the experiment after making minor modifications to the procedures, and once again we found poorer performance on the attention control tests in the gun-present condition.
Conclusion
The results from the two experiments provide initial evidence that gun presence undermines the capacity to control attention. We suspect that this pattern of results may be relevant for policy discussions regarding the presence of guns in academic settings. Armed guards or armed teachers may be intended to keep students safe from external threats, but at what cost? Our findings suggest the possibility of a cognitive cost, in the form of poorer attention control.
But we are far from knowing how the cognitive effects of gun presence play out in the real world. Our laboratory setup is not a proper substitute for a public school classroom, so future research is needed to expand these findings to more realistic settings. Moreover, we tested only college students, but the increase in guns in educational spaces extends even to elementary schools.
As always, more research is needed to better understand the effects of being around guns. Perhaps these initial findings will spur further studies examining the psychological consequences of being in the presence of guns. It may be that gun presence affects not only attention but also how students feel, how they make decisions, and how they evaluate their educational experiences. These would be good things to know before introducing even more guns into even more academic spaces, and we hope future research helps to inform efforts to create safe environments that also promote academic success and student wellbeing.
