The Triumph of the Gun-Rights Argument by Harry Wilson

Author:Harry Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
Published: 2014-01-26T05:00:00+00:00

MEASURING GUN OWNERSHIP

As described in Chapter 3, because there is no gun registry in the United States, gun ownership rates have to be estimated. Although they are not the only method of measuring gun ownership, public opinion surveys are arguably the best method. According to Gallup, respondents reporting a firearm in the household have varied between 34 percent and 51 percent in the past two decades, although there is no clear trend.6 Other polls have found declining gun ownership. Both the General Social Survey and the Pew Center found about a 10 percent drop—from the mid-40s percent to the mid-30s percent—in respondents stating there was a firearm in the household between 1993 and 2013.

Single-person households climbed from 13 percent in 1960 to 23 percent in 1980 and 27 percent by 2010.7 Certainly, an increase in the percentage of households in which a female lives alone or as a single parent will drive down the percentage of households with a firearm. Research has shown some underreporting of gun ownership, especially by females, but the rate of underreporting has been disputed.8 Still, questions asked consistently by the same polling firm using the same methodology should be useful for measuring the stability of opinion and for trend analysis.

Those trends may be impacted by the underreporting of firearm ownership. Gun owners tend be less trustful of the government and other institutions.9 This lack of trust could translate into reluctance to tell a stranger, even with promised confidentiality, that one is a gun owner.10 Pollsters generally assume that nonresponse is evenly distributed and thus does not impact the results. Nonresponse that is disproportionate, however, can lead to inaccurate measures. If gun owners are more likely to fail to respond to the question, then we may underreport gun ownership.

The number of hunters in the United States steadily declined throughout the 1990s, but has largely stabilized since then. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 14.6 million hunting licenses were sold nationwide in 2013.11 Given that not all hunters are required to purchase licenses, this would somewhat underestimate the total number of hunters. For more than a decade, sales of handguns have greatly outpaced long guns, more commonly used for hunting, and the reasons for owning a firearm have changed as well. In short, measuring gun ownership is not as simple as we might think.

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