But the head of a University of Chicago research program said there are differences between blacks and whites on this issue. The differences between the races reflected in the survey cover a wide range of handgun-related issues. While less than half of whites favor government control of handguns, nearly 60 percent of blacks do. Blacks and whites agree the Constitution should guarantee an individual the right to own guns, but it's a much closer call among African-Americans. While nearly two-thirds of whites feel that way, a little more than half of blacks do.
Whites are more likely to think handguns serve a worthwhile purpose.
More than half of whites say having a gun in a home makes the people who live there safer, but blacks split evenly on that question. People of both races are equally likely to own a handgun, however, with about 30 percent of whites and blacks having them. These differing attitudes may be explained by the fact that whites are more likely to have grown up in a culture where there were guns around the house, usually owned for hunting. Whites are more than twice as likely as blacks, for example, to own a rifle or shotgun. More than half of whites were given their first gun by a parent or other relative, but one-fifth of blacks got their first firearm that way.