Every major city in Florida and North Carolina checking in here. The majority of professionals that I have befriended over the years have gun collections and more than a few wear concealed ankle guns everyday, even in the office. These are heavily conservative finance folks though so maybe it’s a gun demographic. Surely there are stats on ownership we can see.
I made the statement based on the facts that while there are roughly 200 million guns in the US, most gun owners have multiple guns (i.e., most people don’t own guns), and guns are far more popular in rural areas. When we lived in New Jersey, the leases specifically prohibited us from having guns in the house or apartment.
According to https://www.statista.com/statistics/249740/percentage-of-hou... , 42% of households have guns, so while it’s close, the median household does not have a gun. And, again, firearms are far more common in rural areas than in urban areas, so I believe the statement is true.
I'm extremely skeptical of any stats around firearm counts, and ownership stats. Firearms aren't registered, which means the only data we have are the amount of background checks for buying them from a dealer (which goes through a department at the FBI called NICS). The issue is:
+ Those background checks are used for lots of things other than firearm purchases
+ Firearms can be transferred legally in some cases without background checks
+ Plenty of firearms existed before the background check system and are still owned and functioning
+ Many firearms are purchased, left to rust or otherwise break, and never repaired.
+ Firearms are occasionally turned in to the police or surrendered (usually when a family member passes and their relatives don't know what to do with the firearms).
The other source of information is directly asking people, but that runs into a bunch of problems too, mostly that people will lie.
I also don't think there's any kind of remotely common pattern that lets us correct this bad data from self reporting. Liberal gun owners are likely to lie about owning a firearm since they don't want their family to know, and conservative firearm owners are less likely to trust the person they're reporting to. Many firearm owners are taught to never ever talk about being a firearm owner to avoid being a target for burglary.
My point is, we simply don't know at all. Any gross figure is extremely suspect.
Yes, I remember a friend showing me some rifles he had recently inherited, followed by the statement that as far as he knew they had never been registered and no matter how the law changed, they wouldn’t be registered while he owned them.
Still, bad numbers are all we’ve got. I’m sure most Americans have seen guns, or know gun owners, but I’m also sure most Americans — especially most urban Americans — don’t actually own guns themselves. If they did, people wouldn’t routinely confuse “semiautomatic” and “machine gun” or “submachine gun.”
I currently live in Texas and the amount of firepower that any one person owns is not readily apparent. Texas is not the wild west that many think is with everyone packing heat and daily shootouts at the corner. Open carry is now legal here and I've yet to see the first person doing so.
