Is there any real way to know?
Peace,
mangeorge
I’d start here:
Bellesiles wrote a book (Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture) that was later found to be based on questionable data.
What little I can tell you is that the weapons in the hands of the Mass militia at Lexington and Concord were for the most part Tower muskets provided by the British Crown. On the frontier it appears that everybody had some sort of fire arm, both for hunting and for defense. A Pennsylvania or Kentucky rifle, however, was a pretty expensive item and probably identified the owner as a long hunter - a man who spent at least part of the year in the western wilderness hunting and claiming land. In town, New York, Boston, Richmond, Charleston and the like, gun ownership was probably not widespread. No particular citations for this, just general reading.
William G. Merkel, Mandatory Gun Ownership, the Militia Census of 1806, and Background Assumptions concerning the Early American Right to Arms, 25 Law & Hist. Rev. 187, 189 (2007)
From the Wiki article on the US miliita: Militia (United States) - Wikipedia
There are a variety of variables that need to be considered.
The population of the country was mostly divided among small, individual farms. About 95% of the population farmed. Few of these farms were in what even then were considered frontier areas. The vast majority of the population lived within 100 miles of the Atlantic Coast. These were relatively civilized areas, with few immediate threats, either from Indians, wild game, raiders, or other menaces. And farmers were not well off. Most lived subsistence lives, caring for their families but not exactly prosperous.
People in cities probably dealt with more danger, in the form of crime, drunkenness, vagrants, escaped prisoners and whatnot, than people on farms. However, they also depended more on whatever formal or informal constables or police their city offered than on their own efforts to control this crime.
Plantation owners in the south, and large estate owners in the north, tended to be recreational and professional hunters. Their estates obviously bordered more wild land as a norm (although George Washington and George Mason had adjacent plantations on the Potomac far away from the wilderness), and they had potentially unruly populations of slaves to control. However, while their influence was huge their absolute numbers were tiny.
What almost none of them had were access to industry. Gun-making was not yet standardized with interchangeable parts. It needed to be crafted by a blacksmith or other specialist or imported.
So, without looking at individual statistics, the odds are that, in general, only a small percentage of the population needed guns for safety or for garnering food. Guns would be helpful to eliminate pests, to hunt game, or for gentlemanly pleasure sport. For all except the tiny elite, guns were an expensive luxury. In most places, at most times, for most people, there was no urgent physical need for a gun prior to the revolution.
Whether there was a psychological need, i.e., whether people wanted to be armed or felt more secure with a rifle or musket handy is a much harder question to answer and that’s where most of the controversy comes in.
Questionable data? How about totally discredited, as he was forced to surrender his award…
I was being charitable.
The gentleman in question that exposed Bellesiles as a fraud wrote a paper that has actual research in it on this topic. You can find the abstract here and you can download the full paper from that page. Warning: the paper is a PDF and is 67 pages long, so be forewarned.
Unfortunately, being charitable toward Bellesiles’ work gives it even just a small amount of credibility, which it does not deserve. If the OP is looking for a serious answer, that is certainly NOT the place to start.