“Individuals Personal Over 415 Million Firearms,”

There is a new survey geared toward figuring out patterns of gun possession and defensive gun use, from Prof. William English on the Georgetown College. It is a lot bigger than most different such surveys, with over 54,000 grownup American respondents, of whom over 16,700 personally owned weapons.

It measures some issues that others have already measured—as an illustration, its estimate of the grownup firearms possession price, 32%, is on par with different surveys. (Another surveys additionally attempt to estimate what fraction of households accommodates a minimum of one gun; this one did not, although in response to my e-mail Prof. English wrote, “the person gun possession estimates are very a lot in step with different latest surveys that requested about possession on the particular person stage; and a few of these additionally requested about family possession (Pew, Gallup), usually discovering family charges within the 42-44% vary.”) However the survey additionally offers us some knowledge that has hardly ever been gathered earlier than, together with (objects reordered):

• “Total, Individuals personal in extra of 415 million firearms, consisting of roughly 171 million handguns, 146 million rifles, and 98 million shotguns.”
• “30.2% of gun house owners, about 24.6 million individuals, have owned an AR-15 or equally
  styled rifle, and as much as 44 million such rifles have been owned.”
• “48.0% of gun house owners, about 39 million individuals, have owned magazines that maintain over 10 rounds, and as much as 542 million such magazines have been owned.”

There’s extra fascinating stuff within the survey, which I hope to report on in later posts. One normal word: Surveys after all have varied limitations, together with that respondents may misreport data (intentionally or inadvertently), yielding both overcounts or undercounts. Nonetheless, for questions reminiscent of this, a well-designed survey is probably going the very best supply of knowledge. There is no such thing as a centralized federal registry of gun house owners, and few such registration necessities within the states; plus any such registry would doubtless be extremely incomplete. Gun manufacturing, export, and import knowledge could be a helpful solution to infer the whole variety of weapons, however it has its personal limitations. Maybe due to this, surveys have lengthy been an ordinary, although admittedly imperfect, means of estimating gun possession charges and the like.