Is it normal to have second thoughts after buying your first gun?

You did the research. You took the background check. You brought the box home, put it on the kitchen table, and waited to feel safer. Instead you feel something closer to dread. The gun is in your house now, and you're not sure you like that.

If you're having second thoughts after buying your first gun, you've probably noticed that nobody warned you about this part. The buying guides end at the counter. So you start wondering whether the feeling is a sign that you made a mistake, or a sign that you're not the kind of person who should own one.

The feeling is real, and it is common in exactly your demographic. It also has a job to do. This article is about what that job is.

Does feeling uneasy mean you shouldn't own a gun?

That's the belief, and it comes at you from two directions.

Traditional gun culture tends to treat comfort as the baseline. In that framing, a real gun owner is relaxed around firearms, and someone who isn't should probably go home. Meanwhile, plenty of people in your own circle hold the mirror image: a person who feels conflicted about a gun has no business having one, and the discomfort proves it.

Both versions treat your unease as a verdict. One says it disqualifies you from gun culture, the other says it disqualifies you from the gun, and they agree that the feeling means something is wrong with you.

It's worth taking the belief seriously before dismissing it. A gun is dangerous. Discomfort around a dangerous thing is not irrational. The question is what the discomfort is telling you to do.

What's actually true?

Start with who you are, statistically. The idea that gun owners are all people who grew up comfortable around firearms stopped being accurate a few years ago.

A study in Annals of Internal Medicine, drawing on the 2021 National Firearms Survey, estimated that 7.5 million U.S. adults became new gun owners between January 2019 and April 2021. About half of them were women, about 20% were Black, and about 20% were Hispanic. Most of them, 5.4 million, brought the first gun into a home that had never had one. The people who were already gun owners and bought more looked nothing like this group: 70% male and 74% white.

The political picture tilts the same way. A 2023 national survey from researchers at Johns Hopkins found that among people who had bought a gun since 2020, about half of the Democrats were buying their first gun, compared with about a quarter of the Republicans. New owners in that survey were far more likely than longtime owners to say the purchase was motivated by concern about racial violence or political violence.

So the person who buys a gun with mixed feelings, because the news got scary and not because they love guns, is not an edge case. Over a two-year stretch, that was a large share of everyone buying a first gun.

Now the feeling itself. Pew Research Center asked gun owners in 2023 how they felt about having a gun in the home. 12% of gun owners said they worry about it. Among people who don't own a gun but live in a house with one, the worried share more than doubled, to 27%. And Pew found that Democratic gun owners were more likely than Republican gun owners to say they worry.

Read that carefully. The worry has been measured, and it shows up most in the people who are newest to this and least steeped in gun culture. You're not malfunctioning. You're in the group where this feeling lives.

Why do people believe otherwise?

Partly because the loudest version of gun culture performs ease. If your only picture of a gun owner is someone who treats a firearm like a cordless drill, your own hesitation looks like failure.

Partly because the people around you may have reacted to your purchase the way you feared. When your friends see the gun as a betrayal of shared values, it is hard to admit that you have doubts too, because the doubts sound like agreeing with them.

And partly because the reason you bought it hasn't gone away. If the purchase was driven by a threat, the box on the table doesn't remove the threat. It adds a new responsibility on top of it. Ownership was never going to deliver the relief you expected. Competence might.

Why does this matter?

Because the feeling drives what you do next, and the two most common exits are both bad.

The first bad exit is avoidance. The gun goes in a closet. You don't take a class, because the class means admitting you own it. You don't learn how it works, because handling it makes the feeling worse. A year later there's a firearm in your home that you half understand. That is the genuinely dangerous version of gun ownership, and it's a direct product of unresolved unease.

The second bad exit is performance. You decide that real gun owners don't feel this way, so you stop feeling it on purpose. You adopt the posture and skip the training, because training is for people who are scared. Your doubt was doing useful work, and you fired it.

The useful exit is less dramatic. You treat the discomfort as an instruction to get competent. Gun owners themselves tend to agree about where that starts: in the same 2023 Johns Hopkins survey, about 79% of gun owners supported requiring first-time buyers to take a safety course on handling and storage before buying. The people who already own guns think the first step for a new owner is a class.

The LGBTQ+ firearms-education group Operation Blazing Sword puts the goal more plainly. Its stated purpose is to teach the basics of firearm safety and operation so that people can make an informed decision regarding whether or not owning a gun is right for them. The decision comes after the education, and "no" is one of the allowed answers. This whole article rests on that order.

What should you do instead?

Five things, in roughly this order.

Take a class before you go to the range

Not a YouTube video. A class, with a human who will watch your hands and answer the question you're embarrassed to ask. A Tactical Snowflakes training party is designed for people who have never handled a firearm: it happens in a home, with inert training guns and no live ammunition in the house, and nobody is asked to explain why they're there. That's the room this format was built for. If you want to know what inclusive instruction looks like and how to spot a bad instructor, start here. If you'd rather find a class elsewhere, here's where progressive gun owners actually train.

Learn your gun with no ammunition in the room

A lot of the unease is just unfamiliarity, and your gun is still unfamiliar. Learn where the controls are and how to check whether it's loaded. Learn how to open the action and close it. Do all of this with every round of ammunition in a different room. That isn't overkill. Shooting Illustrated's dry-practice skills check starts the same way: remove all live ammunition from the practice area and make sure the firearm is unloaded before anything else happens.

Three rules apply every single time, and Project ChildSafe, the firearm industry's safety-education program, states them in one place: always keep the gun pointed in a safe direction, never assume a firearm is unloaded, and keep your finger off the trigger until you're ready to fire. If racking the slide is hard, the fix is technique, and it's a common complaint. If you want a structured way to build familiarity at home, dry-fire practice is the standard method, and that guide covers how to do it safely.

Give it a home

A gun in a closet is a source of low-grade anxiety. A gun in a locked container you chose on purpose is a decision you made. The Oregon Health Authority summarizes the state's storage law this way: ORS 166.395 requires that whenever a firearm isn't being carried by or under the control of its owner or an authorized person, it be secured with an engaged trigger or cable lock, in a locked container, or in a gun room. On the same page, OHA's practical guidance is to store the gun unloaded in a lock box or safe, with the ammunition somewhere else.

Start there. Our guide to safes and lockboxes covers what to buy and why unanchored boxes are a problem. The question of whether and how to keep a gun ready for home defense is a real one, and it's a decision you make later, with training behind you, not on day one.

Write down what it's for

One sentence. "This is for home defense, and it stays in the bedroom safe." "This is for learning, and it comes out for dry fire on Sundays." The sentence doesn't have to be permanent. It has to exist, because a gun without a defined purpose is a gun whose presence you have to re-justify every time you notice it.

Give yourself permission to say no

After a class, after some range time, after the gun has a locked home and a purpose, you may find the feeling has settled into ordinary respect for a dangerous tool. That's the outcome training is for.

Or you may find it hasn't. That tells you something as well. You can sell the gun or give it to someone else, with one condition: Oregon State Police state that private-party transfers require a background check under ORS 166.435. Our guide to a gun you inherited and don't want walks through how that works. Deciding, after learning, that this isn't for you is the informed decision Operation Blazing Sword describes. The closet is the failure.

The short version

• Feeling uneasy after buying your first gun is common, and it clusters in new owners who didn't grow up around firearms, per the Annals of Internal Medicine study and the 2023 Pew survey linked above.
• The feeling isn't a verdict on whether you should own a gun. It's an instruction to get competent.
• Avoidance and false confidence are the two bad exits. Training, a locked home for the gun per the OHA storage page, and a written purpose are the good one.
• You are allowed to decide, after learning, that this isn't for you. Passing the gun on to another private person requires a background check, per the Oregon State Police page linked above.

If you'd like to take the first step with people who won't make you feel stupid for asking, book a training party. Bring the doubt with you. It's welcome.