Gloria is 40 years old, a mother of five and a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She is also a gun owner.
Gloria was one of the dozens of gun owners interviewed by two University of Kansas researchers, Abbie Vegter and Margaret Kelley, for a groundbreaking new study exploring the religious connection to gun ownership.
“When asked about why she owned a gun,” the researchers write in “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Gun Ownership,” published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, “Gloria expressed a desire ‘to protect innocence.’ She related this back to the idea of the supernatural, sharing ‘I guess it goes back to good and evil. I would hope that I would always choose the good side, and sometimes that means that you’ve got to get rid of the bad guy.’”
— Mya Jaradat in Understanding America: Is there a connection between faith and firearms?