“It will be interesting to see how this new estimate is used,” said Karp. In the United States, estimates of privately owned guns have political ramifications, too, as candidates and voters debate whether guns should be harder or easier to acquire. It has implications for law enforcement and public safety policy, since clear records of who owns which guns would make it easier to trace crime weapons and disarm people who commit offenses that make them ineligible to possess guns they had previously lawfully purchased. Knowing the total number of guns in civilian hands isn’t just an academic pursuit. “Nobody really knows how many guns leave circulation each year,” she said. But Deborah Azrael of Harvard, who co-authored the NFS report, says the actual rate could be lower. The National Firearms Survey, along with researchers Ludwig and Cook, factor a 1 percent annual depreciation rate to the gun supply, to account for the disposal of older guns. Ĭomplicating matters further is how or whether estimates account for the number guns that fall out of circulation. Some ideologically motivated firearm advocates assert that American civilians own as many as 600 million guns. In the American gun world, estimates are even higher. “A lot of countries do nothing to keep track of their civilians’ guns.” “There’s no standardized international reporting system,” Karp said. It would be interesting to know the number of people who qualify and own rifles in Russia, there are some figures below. As you can see it takes quite a while (5 years) before you can own rifled firearms. The Small Arms Survey combined and weighted a wider array of sources, including government registries in other countries, academic surveys like the NFS, law enforcement and manufacturing data, and other proxy measures.īoth methods are ways of working around the absence of reliable government data. Below you can see Kalashnikov Concern’s explanation on who in Russia can own smooth bore (shotguns) or rifled firearms and how many. Researchers took respondents at their word about how many weapons they owned. The 2015 National Firearms Survey was based on direct surveys of individual gun owners. The rise in privately held guns came from the emergence of hardcore firearm aficionados who represent just 3 percent of all gun owners but individually possess an average of 17 guns each and collectively account for half of the civilian stockpile. The study showed the percentage of Americans owning guns as essentially flat. Its authors calculated that the nation’s firearms stockpile had increased by only 70 million guns since 1994, the last time a detailed, nationally representative survey was conducted, by researchers Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig. The Small Arms Survey count is significantly higher than one produced by the National Firearms Survey, a joint project of Harvard and Northeastern University, which in 2015 estimated that American civilians owned 265 million guns.
#What types of guns can civilians own archive#
Gun Deaths Increased in 2017, Gun Violence Archive Data Show