You’ll be shocked You know you want one. Now there’s a study to support why: Millions of Americans who had never owned a gun purchased a firearm during a two-and-a-half-year period that began in January 2019, before the pandemic, and continued through April 2021. Of the 7.5 million people who bought their first firearm during that period, 5.4 million had until then lived in homes without guns, researchers at Harvard and Northeastern University estimated. The new buyers were different from the white men who have historically made up a majority of gun owners. Half were women, and nearly half were people of color (20 percent were Black, and 20 percent were Hispanic). “The people who were always buying are still buying — they didn’t stop. But a whole other community of folks have come in,” said Michael Anestis, the executive director of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center, who was not involved in the study. “The real question I wanted to answer was, What do people get out of having a gun?” said Nick Buttrick, a psychologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Why would somebody want to take this really dangerous thing and bring it into their lives?” So devised a study using mild electric shocks, Dr. Peter Venkman-style. Seriously? While the shocks were administered, participants were given a friend’s hand, a metal object or a prop that looked and felt like a pistol but had no firing mechanism. For participants who grew up around guns, holding the prop that resembled a…