Gun owners' opinions about firearms and gun laws depend partly on whether they're urban or rural

Gun owners have different experiences and opinions about gun laws, depending on whether they live in urban, suburban or rural areas, the Pew Research Center has found in its polling.

Gun ownership is much more common in rural areas (58 percent of rural households report having a firearm), and "gun owners in rural areas are far more likely than urban owners to cite hunting as a major reason they own a gun (48 percent vs. 27 percent, respectively)," Ruth Igielnik reports for Pew. "Rural gun owners also tend to become gun owners at an earlier age," and "Americans who grew up in rural areas are more likely to have grown up with guns in their homes."

Those numbers help explain how firearms are a part of rural culture, which associates the right to own guns with a personal sense of freedom. In rural areas, 82 percent of gun owners "say the right to own guns is essential to their personal sense of freedom, compared with 59 percent of gun owners in urban areas,' Igielnik reports.

"One notable similarity between rural and urban gun owners is how they store their guns. Similar shares of gun owners in rural areas (56 percent) and urban communities (51 percent) say there is a gun that is both loaded and easily accessible to them all or most of the time when they are home."