The following information is from a July 8, 2015 article written by Julia Lurie for the leftwing magazine, Mother Jones. I’ve filtered out Lurie’s liberal qualifiers and slant, so as to distill just the facts.
According to a nationally representative online survey of 4,000 people in 2013, conducted by Columbia University public health researcher Bindu Kalesan, the results of which were published in the journal Injury Prevention:
- There are roughly 300 million guns in the United States.
- Nearly a third of adults (or 1 in 3) owns a gun.
- Gun ownership rates vary widely by state: Alaska tops the list with 62% of adults saying they own a firearm; Delaware is at the bottom with just 5%.
- The most likely demographic group to own a gun are white males over 55 who have finished high school and are, or have been, married.
- Gun owners are more than twice as likely as non-owners to be part of a “social gun culture” in which family and friends often own guns.
Lurie claims that past studies have found higher gun ownership rates are correlated with higher gun death rates, and the findings of the Columbia University survey “appear to confirm that trend.”
The graph below compares gun ownership rates from the Columbia U. study with gun death data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:
~Éowyn