ABSTRACT
Most of the felons in the sample grew up around guns and had owned and used guns for most of their lives. This chapter aims to select states on the basis of two state characteristics that they anticipated might be relevant to the weapons behavior of the felon population: the density of private gun ownership in the state and the stringency of state firearms regulations. Personal interviews were originally proposed for the data collection but were rejected in favor of self-administered questionnaires for a variety of reasons. Self-administration would provide for greater anonymity and would be substantially less intrusive at the site than face-to-face interviewing would have been. The lack of education and limited employment histories of the felon population and are certainly evident in the sample as well. Socioeconomically, the average man in the sample left school in the tenth or eleventh grade and had an uncertain employment history.
