The Connection Between Religion and Guns

There is a connection between strength of religious belief  and support for gun control laws, the reason for which is hard to fathom. Fifty-seven percent of white evangelical Protestants live in houses with one or more persons owning guns, compared to fifty-five percent for  white mainline Protestants and thirty-one percent for Catholics. Jewish persons rank even lower on this gun ownership measure. According to a 2012 survey done by Public Religion Research Institute, only thirty-five percent of white evangelical Protestants and forty-two percent of white mainline Protestants favored the passage of stricter gun control laws, versus sixty-two percent of Catholics and sixty percent of those who professed no religious affiliation. In a 2013 poll by the same organization, seventy-six percent of African-American Protestants; sixty-seven of Catholics; sixty percent of the religiously unaffiliated; and thirty-eight percent of white evangelical Protestants favored stricter gun controls. White mainline Protestant support for stricter gun control jumped to fifty-seven percent, perhaps reflecting the reality that there had been several gun massacres between the two surveys. [1]

Eighty percent of white evangelical Protestants described themselves as pro-life in one of the surveys described above, and there is a belief among some evangelicals that depriving people of "self-defense" guns is the denial of a God-given right. Another reason why white evangelical Protestants may be most opposed to stricter gun control laws among the groups surveyed, is a belief that corrupt, non-Christian values are the problem, not the easy availability of guns. Whatever the reason for white Protestants displaying the lowest levels of support for stricter gun control laws, FBI statistics done on an annual basis  show that the South -- where the white Protestant Bible belt is located --  has the highest homicide rate among the regions of the United States.
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ADDENDUM:
*Armed police in England and Wales fired their weapons only twice during 14,864 operations in 2013-14. Only one person has been killed by armed police in England and Wales in the last four years. In the last twenty-four days of 2014, American police killed more people than police in England and Wales have killed in the last twenty-four years. Contrary to the U.S. practice of arming virtually every police officer, just 209 of the 6,700 officers in the Greater Manchester Police are armed. [2]

Taking population differences into account, people in the United States are 100 times more likely to be shot by the police than British people are. [3]

Footnotes
[1] Lawrence Wittmer, :Guns and the Godly," The Blog, Huffpost, July 12, 2015.

[2] Clancy Sigal, "Bang Bang! You're Not Dead," peaceworker.org, July 23, 2015. (Derived from Washington Post and United Kingdom factoids.)

[3] Ibid.