FYI: There are a lot of people who own guns in America, but they are a minority. By a large margin, most homes (about 2/3 of homes) do not have any gun owners. The popularly of guns varies by region... it is a big country and there are lots of cultural differences from state to state.
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.
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.
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.
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%.
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.
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.
That said, I've had to play something of the foil to my gun-friendly friends, pointing out inaccuracies of memes and such, and cautioning against leaping to too many conclusions. For every example of gun control failing, there seems to be a counter-example elsewhere. I think it's fair to say that gun control laws, strict or lax, have very little effect on crime rates altogether, and in my own studies, have found that gun violence is most prevalent wherever there is greater economic disparity or distress.
That isn't particularly great knowledge to either party's agenda, but makes me really wish that our nation would get over its fetish against "assault weapons" and start working on the real causes of violence.
Exactly what kind of ridiculous caricature of the US does your local media give you?
The law passed in 1986 basically prohibited civilian ownership of automatic firearms manufactured after that date, so almost exclusively, legally owned fully automatic firearms owned today were manufactured before 1986.
Knowing that the Registry for automatic weapons was closing, some manufacturers registered as many as they could before the deadline. To this day you can get "new" Sten SMGs if you're willing to pay enough (~$5-6k last I looked). There are piles of metal pipes with serial numbers stamped on them in a couple of warehouses that are legally considered automatic weapons.
It's the rare bird that is willing to endure the months of waiting and background checks for the pleasure of spending their money as quickly as possible.