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I've never considered gun owners a minority, but it appears that you're correct. That said, approximately 40% of households self-report as having a gun accordi

I've never considered gun owners a minority, but it appears that you're correct. That said, approximately 40% of households self-report as having a gun according to the recent stats I've been able to find. It's important to note that from 2010 or so to today, firearms and ammunition sales have been substantially elevated. Until this year, it's been basically impossible to find inexpensive .22 ammo. A couple of weeks ago I needed a couple of boxes for a range visit (introducing a new friend to guns), and I had to visit seven different stores before I finally found some. A year ago, I wouldn't have been able to find it locally at all. I grew up in Arkansas and lived there until mid-2013. I'd guess that 70% or more of households there have at least one gun, and most of those would have multiples. A centerfire hunting rifle and a shotgun would probably be most popular, followed by a centerfire handgun. Maybe 20% of households have 5 or more. Obviously my estimates above are based on my own perception, but I believe them to be conservative. After moving to central Virginia, I can definitely tell that fewer people here are comfortable around firearms. I suspect that's mostly accounted for through population density - I now live in a small city instead of a rural area.

bmelton 12y ago
I too have found the claim that only 1/3 of homes have a firearm to be dubious, especially as it's all self-reporting, and I have a very hard time imagining too many gun owners answering 'yes', even to an anonymous survey.
- PhasmaFelis 12y ago
  > I too have found the claim that only 1/3 of homes have a firearm to be dubious Really? Why? I'd have thought that was a bit high, off the top of my head. Most people don't have any reason to own a gun. Hunting is very popular as hobbies go, but it's a lot of work and isn't practical for a lot of people. As for self/home defense, a reasonable person isn't going to go to the trouble and expense of acquiring a handgun unless they feel genuinely threatened, which I can't imagine is hugely common. Own must of course account for the NRA-driven fetishist attitude that you ought to own a gun as a matter of principle even if it's completely worthless to you, but again I can't really see that stretching beyond 33%.
  - bmelton 12y ago
    Anecdata, I suppose, but while I never cared for guns myself (until somewhat recently, I've become a convert), until I moved to Hawai'i, I honestly don't believe I'd been in a single home that didn't have a firearm in it. To be fair, I grew up in the South, Virginia and Tennessee, but never rural south, and, to be even fairer, my father was military, so a lot of the homes I'm speaking of were Marines. That said, even outside of military homes, everybody I knew had a firearm of some sort. Beyond that, as I said, I've always been a staunch civil rights advocate, but I'm a recent convert to firearms. I never had any experience with them or opinion of them whatsoever, and always believed that, hey, this is America, if I ever need a firearm, I'll go get one. It wasn't until my current home state attempted to ban a variety of firearms that I got interested in the history of the second amendment, and came to the conclusion that the bans they were enacting were unconstitutional. Since then, in addition to the protests for marriage equality, against NSA surveillance, etc., I've begun attending firearms rallies. In my experience there, I've met many gun owners, many of whom have been asked to self identify as to whether or not they own firearms over the years, and overwhelmingly, the response is 'Nope.' So, the long and short of it is that while I believe the 33% number is too low, I don't have any idea how low it is. Of course, having seen outright, provably false statistics in use by gun control advocates (and again, to be fair, the gun rights advocates aren't always forthcoming with statistics, but I have found their side to be more truthful), and provably wrong exaggerations (e.g., 40% of firearms were purchased without going through a background check), that leads me to believe that the variance is higher than just a couple of points. Admittedly, I can't prove (nor am I trying to) that it's 50% or greater, but while the census puts 'urban' populations as comprising ~80% of America, most of those urban centers aren't big cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco, and outside of areas with heavy gun control, gun ownership rates skyrocket.
    - LyndsySimon 12y ago
      > Beyond that, as I said, I've always been a staunch civil rights advocate, but I'm a recent convert to firearms. I always like to see this. I've always viewed arms possession as a civil right, and I sense that there is something of a paradigm shift in that direction happening. > to be fair, the gun rights advocates aren't always forthcoming with statistics, but I have found their side to be more truthful Part of the problem is that data is extremely hard to come by anything resembling unbiased data on the topic. One of my personal pet peeves is when someone writes about "10,000 kids are murdered in gun violence every year", only to find upon further investigation that for the dataset they used, "kids" refers to all persons age 25 and under and "murdered" really meant "killed by". Counting a 24-year-old gang member who is shot by police as a "child murdered by gun violence" is absurd. I'm not familiar with any similar criticisms going the other direction. The closest thing I've seen would be a handful of academics dismissing the work of John Lott out-of-hand without giving a specific reason for doing so. Asserting that a peer-reviewed paper is "widely discredited" has no meaning when one cannot point to a single published criticism of the work.
JohnBooty 12y ago
Living in Philadelphia's suburbs my whole life, hardly anybody I know (or have known) has owned guns. Maybe 10% or less if I had to guess. I'm sure that some people I know have guns and simply don't talk about them, of course. But the gun owners I do know aren't stigmatized in my social circles or anything, so I wouldn't say there's much incentive to be secretive about it in my social circles. This is all highly anecdotal of course but it just shows how regional the gun ownership thing is in America, along with pretty much everything else as well... > I'd guess that 70% or more of households there have at least one gun, and most of those would have multiples. All of the gun owners I know have multiple guns as well. That's actually probably part of the answer right there with regards the rate of gun ownership in America. There are apparently about 300 million firearms in America and that number, due to controls on manufacturing and importing, is inexact but probably more trustworthy than self-reported ownership numbers. So you figure... there's about one gun for each American... but most gun owners have multiples... so it makes rough ballpark mathematical sense to me that the majority of Americans don't have guns. Unless we think that there are more like a billion guns out there instead of 300 million.

bmelton 12y ago

I too have found the claim that only 1/3 of homes have a firearm to be dubious, especially as it's all self-reporting, and I have a very hard time imagining too many gun owners answering 'yes', even to an anonymous survey.

PhasmaFelis 12y ago
> I too have found the claim that only 1/3 of homes have a firearm to be dubious Really? Why? I'd have thought that was a bit high, off the top of my head. Most people don't have any reason to own a gun. Hunting is very popular as hobbies go, but it's a lot of work and isn't practical for a lot of people. As for self/home defense, a reasonable person isn't going to go to the trouble and expense of acquiring a handgun unless they feel genuinely threatened, which I can't imagine is hugely common. Own must of course account for the NRA-driven fetishist attitude that you ought to own a gun as a matter of principle even if it's completely worthless to you, but again I can't really see that stretching beyond 33%.
- bmelton 12y ago
  Anecdata, I suppose, but while I never cared for guns myself (until somewhat recently, I've become a convert), until I moved to Hawai'i, I honestly don't believe I'd been in a single home that didn't have a firearm in it. To be fair, I grew up in the South, Virginia and Tennessee, but never rural south, and, to be even fairer, my father was military, so a lot of the homes I'm speaking of were Marines. That said, even outside of military homes, everybody I knew had a firearm of some sort. Beyond that, as I said, I've always been a staunch civil rights advocate, but I'm a recent convert to firearms. I never had any experience with them or opinion of them whatsoever, and always believed that, hey, this is America, if I ever need a firearm, I'll go get one. It wasn't until my current home state attempted to ban a variety of firearms that I got interested in the history of the second amendment, and came to the conclusion that the bans they were enacting were unconstitutional. Since then, in addition to the protests for marriage equality, against NSA surveillance, etc., I've begun attending firearms rallies. In my experience there, I've met many gun owners, many of whom have been asked to self identify as to whether or not they own firearms over the years, and overwhelmingly, the response is 'Nope.' So, the long and short of it is that while I believe the 33% number is too low, I don't have any idea how low it is. Of course, having seen outright, provably false statistics in use by gun control advocates (and again, to be fair, the gun rights advocates aren't always forthcoming with statistics, but I have found their side to be more truthful), and provably wrong exaggerations (e.g., 40% of firearms were purchased without going through a background check), that leads me to believe that the variance is higher than just a couple of points. Admittedly, I can't prove (nor am I trying to) that it's 50% or greater, but while the census puts 'urban' populations as comprising ~80% of America, most of those urban centers aren't big cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco, and outside of areas with heavy gun control, gun ownership rates skyrocket.
  - LyndsySimon 12y ago
    > Beyond that, as I said, I've always been a staunch civil rights advocate, but I'm a recent convert to firearms. I always like to see this. I've always viewed arms possession as a civil right, and I sense that there is something of a paradigm shift in that direction happening. > to be fair, the gun rights advocates aren't always forthcoming with statistics, but I have found their side to be more truthful Part of the problem is that data is extremely hard to come by anything resembling unbiased data on the topic. One of my personal pet peeves is when someone writes about "10,000 kids are murdered in gun violence every year", only to find upon further investigation that for the dataset they used, "kids" refers to all persons age 25 and under and "murdered" really meant "killed by". Counting a 24-year-old gang member who is shot by police as a "child murdered by gun violence" is absurd. I'm not familiar with any similar criticisms going the other direction. The closest thing I've seen would be a handful of academics dismissing the work of John Lott out-of-hand without giving a specific reason for doing so. Asserting that a peer-reviewed paper is "widely discredited" has no meaning when one cannot point to a single published criticism of the work.

JohnBooty 12y ago

Living in Philadelphia's suburbs my whole life, hardly anybody I know (or have known) has owned guns. Maybe 10% or less if I had to guess. I'm sure that some people I know have guns and simply don't talk about them, of course. But the gun owners I do know aren't stigmatized in my social circles or anything, so I wouldn't say there's much incentive to be secretive about it in my social circles. This is all highly anecdotal of course but it just shows how regional the gun ownership thing is in America, along with pretty much everything else as well... > I'd guess that 70% or more of households there have at least one gun, and most of those would have multiples. All of the gun owners I know have multiple guns as well. That's actually probably part of the answer right there with regards the rate of gun ownership in America. There are apparently about 300 million firearms in America and that number, due to controls on manufacturing and importing, is inexact but probably more trustworthy than self-reported ownership numbers. So you figure... there's about one gun for each American... but most gun owners have multiples... so it makes rough ballpark mathematical sense to me that the majority of Americans don't have guns. Unless we think that there are more like a billion guns out there instead of 300 million.