Gun Ownership

The United States is the global leader in gun ownership. Surveys in the early 2020s indicated that around 32 percent of Americans personally own a gun. The number of Americans living in a household with a gun is somewhat higher, estimated at 40–44 percent.

Gun ownership is controversial. Gun control advocates believe that legal gun ownership encourages and escalates violence and contributes to higher rates of accidental death and injury. Firearms rights advocates argue that legal gun ownership discourages crime. Advocates also argue that responsible gun ownership is protected by the Second Amendment, which guarantees American citizens the right to own weapons for self-defense. In general, studies on the relationship between guns and violence are inconclusive because insufficient data exists to make determinate correlations.

Gun Ownership Statistics

While there is no national data set indicating exactly how many Americans own guns, surveys have consistently shown the US leading all other countries by a wide margin in the total number of civilian guns. According to a 2018 report from the Small Arms Survey on international gun stockpiles, the United States ranked first in the world and was a statistical outlier, with approximately 393 million legally owned firearms in 2017—which equates to nearly half of the world's civilian-owned gun supply. India was ranked a distant second, with about 71.1 million firearms owned by civilians. Per capita, the United States had an estimated 120.5 guns per one hundred people, well above second-place Falkland Islands, at 62.1 guns per hundred people. These estimates continued a long-established picture of the United States as unique in its gun ownership, with an ever-increasing total number of firearms in the country.

Different surveys have regularly shown slightly different estimates on US gun ownership. The high-response-rate General Social Survey (GSS) conducted by the University of Chicago indicated in 2021 that 35.2 percent of Americans live in a household with guns and 24.5 percent actually own guns themselves. Polls by the Pew Research Center and Gallup tend to show slightly higher figures, with Pew finding 42 percent of Americans living in a gun-owning household and 32 percent personally owning guns in 2023. However, studies have also shown that Americans themselves tend to overestimate the number of citizens owning guns, with over 40 percent believing that a majority of people are gun owners.

Research has also suggested there are significant social indicators of gun ownership, including race and political party. According to a 2023 survey by the Pew Research Center, approximately 49 percent of White Americans surveyed had at least one firearm in the household. By comparison, 34 percent of Black respondents and 28 percent of Hispanic respondents said they had a gun in their home. In general, gun ownership is most popular with White adults over fifty years old who are politically conservative and live in rural areas. The large majority of American gun owners—72 percent, according to Pew—cite protection as the main reason for owning a gun.

Although the US gun ownership rate remains high by global standards, the 2021 GSS indicated US gun ownership declined significantly in the late twentieth century. According to an analysis of the statistics, approximately 50 percent of American households had a firearm in the 1970s, compared to 32 percent in 2014. Much of this decline was attributed to a decrease in the popularity of hunting as an American pastime. However, the GSS data indicated that after maintaining a relatively stable rate during the early twenty-first century, the country began to experience a slight rise in gun ownership beginning in 2018.

Rates of gun manufacturing in the country also increased. According to the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), firearm manufacturers in the US produced 9 million guns in 2018, more than twice the amount produced a decade earlier in 2008. Rates of gun purchases appeared to be rising as well. In 2021, the FBI reported significant increases in requests for the federal background checks required to purchase a gun.

Impact

The relationship between gun ownership and violence is one of the most controversial and debated topics in US politics. Highly publicized incidents of firearms killings, especially involving young assailants and victims, have frequently brought gun control to the forefront of the national debate. Gun rights organizations argue that the right to keep firearms is protected by the Second Amendment of the US Constitution and argue that guns promote self-defense and deter crime. The National Rifle Association (NRA), the largest gun lobby in the United States with four million members, donates millions of dollars to public election funds to promote gun rights.

Increasingly, the gun issue has been characterized by a division between Republicans and Democrats, or more generally, conservatives and liberals. Studies have shown that as recently as the 1970s, gun ownership was relatively even across those identifying as Republican, Democrat, or Independent. However, through the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, the percentage of Democrats and Independents owning guns dropped sharply, while the percentage of gun-owning Republicans held mostly steady. By 2016, 62 percent of gun owners voted for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, according to American National Election Studies (ANES), increasing from 58 percent for the Republican nominee in 2012 and 52 percent in 2008. Researchers noted that this political "gun gap" persisted even after controlling for other factors, like demographics, education, or official party affiliation.

Crime is a major factor in differing views on firearms, with conservatives tending to view gun ownership as a crime deterrent and liberals tending to view it as contributing to crime. Both sides of the debate cite statistical evidence as support, but few conclusive determinations can be made. Reports consistently showed that the United States had the highest annual per-capita rate of firearm-related murders of all developed countries, at an estimated 4 per 100,000 people in 2019—eighteen times higher than the average rate of other developed countries. (Honduras led the world in gun homicides per capita, with more than 68 homicides per hundred thousand people.)

Despite the US having much more gun violence than similar countries, firearms advocates point to other statistics to suggest that guns themselves are not the problem. According to US Department of Justice (DOJ) figures published in 2013, firearm-related violence in the United States fell significantly through the 1990s and 2000s. For instance, gun-related homicides declined by 39 percent from 1993 to 2011, while nonfatal firearm crimes declined 69 percent. Pew Research supported the findings of the DOJ, indicating that gun-related homicides fell to historic lows in 2010, with a 49-percent reduction from 1993, though rates then increased between 2010 and 2013.

In the mid-1990s, a number of states adopted new laws that allowed citizens to carry concealed weapons for self-defense. Gun rights groups have credited the reductions in homicide and violent crime in the late twentieth century as evidence that the possession of legal and concealed firearms has deterred crime. In the 1998 book More Guns, Less Crime, John Lott and University of Chicago economics student David Mustard present the results of a study on states with "shall-issue" laws, which allow citizens to own and carry concealed firearms. According to Mustard and Lott, states that permitted concealed weapons saw a reduction in murders by 8.5 percent, rapes by 5 percent, aggravated assaults by 7 percent, and robbery by 3 percent.

Lott and Mustard argue that criminals are deterred by the knowledge that intended victims may be armed, but this causative link is currently impossible to demonstrate. The National Research Council conducted a study in 2005 and found no correlation between concealed weapons permits and crime reduction. A 2013 report from the American Public Health Association, analyzing state-by-state gun ownership and crime rates from 1981 to 2010, indicated that states with higher levels of gun ownership had higher gun homicide rates. Statistical analysis indicated that for each increasing percentage point of gun ownership, the firearm homicide rate increased 0.9 percent.

In general, criminologists and sociologists have been unable to definitively link gun ownership to crime rates. Concealed weapon permits and legal gun ownership have, in general, been concentrated among Americans at the lowest statistical risk of becoming crime victims—affluent White males living in areas with lower-than-average crime rates. While this does not mean that conceal and carry laws do not reduce crime, it indicates that crime rate reductions in high-crime areas are likely linked to factors unrelated to gun ownership.

Other debates related to gun policy remained politically divisive in the US. While a majority of all Americans believed it was too easy to legally obtain a gun in the United States, according to a 2023 Pew Research Center poll, only 24 percent of Republicans and 86 percent of Democrats felt that was true. Likewise, 92 percent of liberal Americans favored stricter gun laws, while 19 percent of conservative Americans did so.

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