The survey conducted online previous year on 4,000 Americans by public health researchers from Harvard and Northeastern universities also shows that the percentage of Americans who own guns decreased slightly from 25 per cent to 22 per cent, driven by a dramatic decrease among men.
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Philip Cook, author of a canonical 1994 report on gun ownership, hailed the forthcoming report as essential to the study of firearms.
Media reports have deemed the survey the most definitive portrait of US gun ownership in two decades, seeing as the country has been lacking in gun violence research since 1996. But not everyone owns a gun, of course: According to the first comprehensive study of owners in more than 20 years, just 3 percent of Americans own half of the guns in the United States.
The survey found that Americans who only owned handguns were much more diverse than gun owners who owned a mix of handguns and long guns, or those who only owned rifles and shotguns.
Though the number of gun owners has risen by 10 million, they now account for a smaller fraction of Americans: About 22 percent of Americans say they own guns, compared to 25 percent in the 1994 study.
Fruitful ground for the NRA.
The survey’s findings support other research showing that as overall rates of gun ownership has declined, the number of firearms in circulation has skyrocketed. Thirty-two percent of American men saying they owned a gun compared to 12 percent of American women.
As surprising as that may sound, concentrated ownership is common for most products.
Researchers said super-owners are comprised mainly of collectors, firearms instructors, gunsmiths, competitive shooters, as well as doomsday survivalists.
Estimating the number of civilian guns in America is hard because no one keeps track of the number of guns sold nationwide.
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But gun owners who possessed just handguns are more likely than before to be women, the Trace reported. They will be publishing their full study results in an academic journal next year.
