this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
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72 million gun owners seems low to me...
Here's a stat that pegs the total number of guns at around 434 million and just under 20 million AR-15s.
https://www.guns.com/news/2020/11/17/data-us-has-434-million-guns-20m-ars-150m-mags
At only 72 million gun owning homes, that would mean, on average, 6 guns per gun owner?
https://americangunfacts.com/gun-ownership-statistics/
22% of gun owners have only a single firearm. So if the 72 million number is correct, that means 15,840,000 single gun owners, and the remaining 418,160,000 guns are owned by 56,160,000, or 7.45 guns per owner.
Sounds about right. I grew up in central Missouri, and while relatively few of my friends had guns, the one that did had a goddamn arsenal in his bedroom. Two shotguns, three rifles, and a "big" handgun that all stayed in a gun safe, and a .22 pistol he kept under the bed "for safety." And that was just his room, as a high schooler... His brother and his mother both had other weapons of their own.
Even people who are just hobby shooters or hunters rather than 2A "mah guns" weirdos like said friend was tend to accumulate weapons over time. It's like any other hobby in that regard.
Yeah, there are a lot of shades of gray for multiple gun owners.
Add in the fact that some people sort of end up collecting guns the way some people collect guitars...I wouldn't be so quick to turn away from the original statistic.
It would be interesting to compare gun ownership to guitar ownership, because the analogy tracks pretty well.
Some people just wanted a guitar. They might play it often, or it might sit in a closet.
Some people have specialty guitars for different reasons. An acoustic for impromptu jam sessions, an electric for band practice, a fancy guitar to play on stage, different bodies for different sounds, etc.
And some people just like collecting guitars. They have a bunch that they have acquired over the years, some favorites, some are investments, some are projects.
I would bet the distribution curve of guns per owner tracks pretty closely with the curve of guitars per owner.
I'll say that while I do know a couple of people that seem to be prepping for an apocalypse scenario where guitars are the most valuable currency, gun owners have a much larger spike at that end of the bell curve.
Other than that I think it'd be a pretty similar distribution, though.
I lived with a guy who had a kayak collection. Different boats for different rivers or different things he wanted to do. You can only be in one boat at a time, so how many can you need?
He once explained to me how he didn't have too many kayaks, he actually had too few. He did not have the money for more boats.
A lot of us just kind of accidentally accumulated various guitars over the years, without ever thinking about it in terms of collecting. I have 6 right now, plus two banjos. I only really play two of them on a regular basis though.
It's probably the same for a lot of gun owners.
I only have one gun that I inherited from my dad. He was a Vietnam combat vet and I think because of his PTSD always liked to have a few guns around the property and in his cars and trucks. My brother has the rest.
LHaving met a good few gun fans. Yeah 7 to 8 guns seems like a low average.
Helped a friend move from a apartment to a new house. Over 15 guns. I say over as he also had a number of parts. I do not know enough to know if complete guns could be built. Looked like a few complete guns possible to my non gun fan eyes.
This was when I lived in GA. He was not considered unusual by most of the friends helping us.
What seems less likely to me. Is all 72m around the US siding with Texas.
They can't fathom this. They think they after all their threats and dehumanization, none of the people they're targeted have gone and gotten guns.
But hey, we always knew logic wasn't their strong suit.
Oh, the math in this is all kinds of fucked up. OPOP knows stats exists, they just haven't met it personally.
Not all 72M gun owners live in Texas, and not all of the ones that do support these turds. They mention an AR15 stat, and then completely ignore it in the conclusion.
Also, as someone else reponded, yeah: 6 guns per owner seems about right on average. I have 6: two rifles and 4 handguns. And there are a few more I'd like to collect; I wouldn't be surprised if I had 10 or 11, eventually. It's a hobby, and I like to shoot. And I don't even hunt; hunters are going to have different guns for differrent game, and might have even more than average.
It's a hobby, and like hobbies, the people who are into it are going to own predominantly more of the thing. The 2A and gun violence make it a political and socially sensitive topic, and changes the verbiage, but otherwise the same hobby trends apply.
The population of the US is ~330 million total.
By the pigeonhole principal, that means that some gun owners must own 2 guns, because there's more guns than people.
Anyways, multiple guns per owner makes intuitive sense, because different guns are for different things. You aren't going to hunt an elk with the same caliber rifle you'd hunt a rabbit with. Either you won't kill the elk, or you'll just have a fine mist that used to be a rabbit.
For another thing, ammunition costs are different for different calibers. You can buy .22 lr for under 10 cents per round. Meanwhile, 30-06 is over $1 per round. So you can do more target practice for the same money with a cheaper round.
Oh, definitely! A .22 and .45-70 both have VERY different applications. I still think 72 million owners on 435 million guns is a low estimate.
Looking it up, gun ownership is apparently very uneven.
In 2016, according to one study half of all the guns in the US were owned by the 3% of Americans with 8-140 guns. That group had an average of 17 guns each, while most gun owners had 3 or fewer guns.