Firearms Survey Says 82.7% of Gun Owners Have Handguns

The overwhelming majority of gun owners in the United States—a whopping 82.7 percent—own handguns and an impressive 16 percent carry a defensive sidearm always, almost always or often.

These stats come from the 2021 National Firearms Survey Draft Report, prepared by William English, PhD, Georgetown University. This survey was conducted between Feb. 17 and March 23 of this year, by Centiment, a professional survey firm. It contains, wrote English, “what we believe is the largest sample of firearms owners every queried about their firearms ownership and firearms use in a scientific survey in the United States.”

Thousands of firearm owners (15,450) responded to the survey and proceeded through all of the questions, English noted in his text.

The survey found 31.1 percent of gun owners, “approximately 25.3 million adult Americans,” have used a gun in self-defense and a shot was never fired in a majority of those cases (81.9 percent). “Displaying a firearm or threatening to use a firearm…was sufficient,” the survey revealed.

This squares with reports in the National Rifle Association’s American Rifleman magazine and its “Armed Citizen” column over the years. Every year, there are “approximately 1.67 million defensive uses of firearms.”

Why is this important? Changing demographics of gun ownership in the U.S. just might be changing the narrative, if not the national attitude, about guns.

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It should come to no surprise that an estimated 7.5 million people “became first-time gun owners” between January 2019 and April 2021, according to a report in the Washington Examiner.

That figure may be on the conservative side. Other estimates go as high as 8 million new gun owners over the past 19 months, ignited by the COVID-19 pandemic panic, months of social unrest, violent rioting and cutting of police budgets and manpower in several agencies. When people started worrying about their safety, longer response times and other troubles, they fell back on the one thing many of them may previously have thought had outlived its usefulness: the Second Amendment.

The Examiner story referenced a Gallup poll updated 11 months ago, which found 32 percent of U.S. adults own a gun and 44 percent live in a household where a gun is present. Gallup says, “roughly two-thirds of Republicans live in gun-owning households, compared to just one-third of Democrats.”

The Washington Examiner story also revealed the New York Times ran a story headlined “Nothing Divides Voters Like Owning a Gun” in 2017. Among the things, this story reported the majority of voters in households where no gun was present voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, with the exception of West Virginia and Wyoming.

Here’s another non-surprise: Pew Research reported in mid-September that 87 percent of non-gun-owning Democrats favor banning so-called “assault weapons.” Eighty -six percent of the same demographic favor banning “high-capacity magazines” that hold more than 10 cartridges.

This brings us back to the National Survey which says 48 percent of gun owners “have owned magazines that hold over 10 rounds.”

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Presumably the 30.2 percent of gun owners who have owned an AR-15 or similar rifle—an estimated 24.6 million people, according to the National Firearms Survey—probably know what a barrel shroud is, and what it doesn’t do.

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Only Five Guns?

The 2021 National Firearms Survey says the average gun owner owns five firearms. There are places in northern Idaho, anywhere in Montana, Utah and Wyoming where such people might be seriously under-equipped.

I am acquainted with a fair number of folks across the West for whom five guns is a trip to the range. I once visited a friend in one of the above-mentioned states who had that many guns stacked in different corners of his home. Another acquaintance had five AR-15 rifles for different applications, in addition to an extensive collection.

“Gun control,” the Washington Examiner said, “despite polling well as a collection of general platitudes, is already a losing issue throughout the country. Each time someone becomes a first-time gun owner, the chances of passing the strict gun control measures that the gun control movement and the majority of the Democratic Party want to see implemented go down.”

Some People Clam Up

An acknowledgement in the 2021 National Firearms Survey Draft Report probably reminds every reader of someone they know.

“One of the challenges in asking questions about firearms is eliciting truthful responses from firearms owners who may be hesitant to reveal information about practices that are associated with public controversy,” the report noted.

A few lines later, the report said, “For example, when (researchers) conducted a telephone survey of Michigan residents who had purchased a hunting license or registered a handgun, only 87.3 percent of the handgun registrants and 89.7 percent of hunting license holders reported having a gun in their household.”

Many gun owners simply think it’s nobody’s business what they own. Consequentially, this survey might be a little light on the data when it says “About a third of adults in the U.S. report owning a firearm, totaling about 81.4 million adult gun owners.” That figure breaks down to 57.8 percent men and 42.2 percent women.

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