No, I'm not going to register my guns.

[PeaceNikki]

47. So... perceiving a foam ball as a gun is a 'heightened sense of awareness'??

here's the full study: http://nd.edu/~jbrockm1/WittBrockmole_inPress_JEPHPP.pdf

And I will c&p the final conclusion:

The familiar saying goes that when you hold a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The apparent harmlessness of this expression fades when one considers what happens when a person holds a gun. We have shown here that, having the opportunity to use a gun, a perceiver is more likely to classify objects held by others as guns and, as a result, to engage in threat-induced behavior (in this case, raising a firearm to shoot). What mechanism gives rise to this bias? One possibility is that it arises from either perceptual or conceptual priming. According to this account, holding a gun could lead observers to adopt particular expectations regarding the presence of firearms. For example, just as stereotypes can evoke a bias to report “gun present,” so might the mere presence of a gun in the environment.

This explanation, however, is not supported by our data. While using a gun to respond to the stimuli increased participants’ bias to see guns, the conspicuous presence a real gun that was never used did not alter the bias to detect guns. Thus, the presence of a gun did not evoke additional priming above and beyond the images and nature of the task, suggesting that action is critical to this perceptual bias.