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Poll: Gun ownership reaches record high with American electorate
A record share of voters in NBC News' latest poll say that they or someone in their household owns a gun.
www.nbcnews.com
MSN
www.msn.com
Last week, NBC News presented a surprising bit of data: for the first time in its two decades of asking, a majority of respondents to its national poll indicated that they lived in a home with a firearm. In 2013, a poll of American adults found that 42 percent lived in households in which there was a gun. In the most recent poll, questioning registered voters, 52 percent said they did. That's the highest share of voters who say that they or someone in their household owns a gun in the history of the NBC News poll, on a question dating back to 1999.
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I had been under the impressive that the surging gun sales were guys who own a few buying more. A guy with 3 guns buys 6 more in a few years, not 6 new gun owners buying 6 guns. There is still definitely a lot of that, most gun owners own more than 1 gun and many own more than 5. But in the second chart above, you can see that rural gun ownership is still trending down (despite the 2020/2021 bump) while Suburban and Urban numbers have been increasing since their low in about 2015. Still not back the the rate of gun ownership in the 1980s though.
Breaking down by race, In August 2019, 53% of white voters said that they or someone in their household owned a gun, and 24% of Black voters said the same. In 2023 56% of white voters report that they or someone in their household owns a gun and 41% of Black voters say the same, – a 17-point increase among that group in just four years.
Legal gun ownership is increasing, and it's not the rural boys just buying up even more than before.