Eh, I don't know if it's ego. Perhaps in some cases, sure.
Regarding why many gun owners don’t compete: It’s a sizable portion which are demotivated by potential impact to their pride, their ego.
I help run a reborn group on FB for beginners in PRS and NRL competition which was over 50,000 people before we got nuked by Zuckerberg and had to restart (now back to a couple thousand). I posted a poll a few months before FB closed us, asking “Why aren’t you competing?” and received a few thousand responses.
**Pausing here to clarify: there were over 50,000 members in a PRS Competition for Beginners group, while the PRS claims only 6,000 participating shooters at any time, and only around 500 pro-series members, with about as many more as regional series members, AND independent study of match data shows there are actually only around 1500 shooters which actually shoot PRS matches at any level during each season… so only 1500-6000 out of 50,000 supposedly interested beginner competitors in our group, hence why I asked the question - “why are you not competing?”
Among provided reasons included and added in the poll, far most common was, “I don’t know how and don’t want to embarrass myself,” with the most common sentiment, with the SECOND most common response being “I don’t have a rifle capable of the sport,” —> and I asked a few hundred of those respondents, “what is stopping you from getting a rifle?” to which a majority responded, “I wouldn’t be able to shoot it well enough if I DID.” which circled us back to the other most common response.
Some folks did respond that they didn’t have anywhere near them to compete, and myself and others helped a couple hundred people across the country find PRS/NRL matches within reasonable driving distances (distances which all of us competing have to drive).
Sure, there were a lot of “It’s too expensive,” and we DID connect some of those folks with NRL22 matches and Production Class options.
But the by far majority of responses, over a thousand out of the poll of a handful more thousand, were that people knew they didn’t have the skills/knowledge, and didn’t want to take the risk of underperforming in their first outings…
**Side note: many folks did mention they HAD tried one match, and realized how far behind their skills OR their rifle was from what was needed (what they deemed to be needed), and they didn’t come back. I heard a Modern Day Sniper podcast about a year later in which a guest host discussed data from PRS matches which showed that - on average - shooters will shoot only one PRS match, at either level, and never come back. One new shooter I spoke with after a “PRS train up day” I helped host said it this way: “when I left the house this morning, I thought I had an accurate rifle and I thought I knew how to shoot, but this afternoon, I know I was wrong.” It took a lot to get him to sign up for a match after that.