Gun Ownership

A study performed by the RAND corporation has been picked up by leftists on social media. The claim is for the number of households who have a firearm in the house. Read:

I replied that I think these numbers are wildly inaccurate. For example, Florida has a claimed household firearms ownership rate of 35.3%. Florida has approximately 8,752,810 households, so the claim is just over 3 million households have a firearm in it. Here is why that number is demonstrably inaccurate:

• Florida does not require concealed weapons permits, yet 2.5 million people in the state have a CCW.
• Since the Brady Act begin requiring NICS checks in 1998, Florida has seen more than 30 million of them performed.

Those two data points alone point to more than 3 million households with a firearm. Still, I pointed out there is no way to be sure, because no one keeps a registry of firearms and their owners. The leftists made the the claim that the numbers were close to accurate because:

• It’s likely from firearms purchased through an FFL where data is collected through the 4473.
• The FBI does the background check. A transfer to you is in their database.
• It could be a household of five all with five firearms but it is still just one household with a firearm.

So to boil it down: The ATF has your data because they somehow have a record of your gun purchases because 4473. Even though that is illegal, and once a firearm is sold by a dealer, no one knows for sure who it was sold to, unless it somehow winds up being resold to a dealer. That’s why the left pushes so hard for universal background checks.

I pointed out the law in the second- the FBI doesn’t do NICS checks, the state police do. He replied how the FBI is better and more trustworthy with your data than the FDLE. Whatever, that still doesn’t validate the above state level data, which actually came from a RAND report created from summing up telephone surveys.

Then there is the antigun trope of claiming just a small minority of people owning a large number of firearms creating an illusion of widespread firearm ownership. That’s simply not true. I have already blogged about that ridiculous claim:

the top twenty percent of all gun owners actually owned 55% of the guns. In terms of absolute figures, ten million people owned 105 million guns – for an average of ten guns per person, and the remaining 87 million guns were owned by 34 million people – for an average of 2.6 guns per person. The population of the U.S. was 263 million in 1994 – indicating that only 16.7% of Americans had actually owned a weapon.

I wrote about this in June of 2016, and I guessed at the time that there were somewhere between 400 and 500 million firearms in the US. Since that time, there have been another 310 million NICS checks.

Again, let’s look at Florida’s demographics- there are just over 8.7 million households in Florida, and those households contain 19 million adults. With over 2.5 million CCW permits, 200,000 known NFA items, and approximately 100,000 active law enforcement officers, there are just about 3 million people right there. That doesn’t account for people with granddad’s hunting rifle, criminals who have a firearm but aren’t going to tell some random survey caller, and others. On the other hand, there are households like my sister and her crotch fruit who don’t own any guns at all. Of course, none of them have a CCW, either.

Looking at the numbers, they seem to support a household ownership rate closer to 60% than to 35%. However, I also admit that my estimate is just as much guesswork as the RAND corporation’s report, because no one can know for sure.