I did not know this until this New York Times story. The General Social Survey has been asking Americans if they have a gun in the house for at least since 1972. Since then the number has dropped steadily, from over 50% to 34% in 2012.
I’ve seen many claims in recent years that gun purchases are skyrocketing. This suggests to me that fewer and fewer people are amassing greater numbers of weapons. Does anyone else have an alternative explanation for this?
I find this story very reassuring on most levels and disturbing on others.
I think that rather than fewer people amassing greater numbers, the same number of people are amassing greater numbers–gun advocates probably now own several times as many guns as they owned 40 years ago. I would also guess that (over the past 40 years) guns were inherited by people who already had guns, so the number of gun owners went down while the number of guns remained the same.
The days of a lot of people living in the country and having a shotgun to shoot dinner are gone with changing times and increase urbanization. What’s left are the enthusiests and the survivalists who probably have more guns.
That said, I do think that a lot of people might not admit to owning guns when asked, especially nowdays when they’re increasingly viewed as evil as opposed to a tool no different than a hammer or a shovel.
Also, a hunter is a type that might own one deer rifle. Hunting is in a decline, not just it involves guns and killing animals, neither of which are politically correct and might get a young person ostracized, but also with the internet and shortening attention spans the idea of spending several days in the woods to get some meat doesn’t hold a lot of attraction for young people compared to just Walmart and buying some.
That is a huge misconception for the vast majority of the country by land area. There is more wildlife, especially among the species like deer that thrive around the edges of human civilization, than there ever has been. A few species have been wiped out but most of the country by land area is more wild now that it was 100 years ago. New England as a region is unrecognizable in photos even in the early 1900’s. Six states were basically clear-cut and looked like the upper-midwest. Today, it is mostly forest by land area even near the cities and large towns and wildlife has rebounded. The same is true for lots of other areas of the country. Most people don’t understand that or believe it because they inhabit the rather small pieces of the country that are urbanized but that is only a small part of the land area.
We need hunters desperately even here in the Boston suburbs because the wildlife, especially deer, has gotten so out of control and that is not to mention all the others like turkeys, squirrels, ground hogs, foxes, coyotes, and everything else. Mountain lions rebounded are a true threat in some western states and their territory is growing.
There are plenty of environmental problems to go around but wildlife conservation and reintroduction efforts in the U.S. in the past 50 years have been remarkably successful overall. Some have been way too successful.
I was in a Bass Pro Shops today (a huge sports megastore) right next to Gillette stadium in Foxboro, MA. I went over to their gun showroom. It has display cases about 75 feet long and they were mostly wiped out of stock. So was the ammunition. Only a few of the less desirable handguns were left. I asked the clerk why that was and he said they couldn’t keep them in stock. They sold almost all of theirs and there is a nationwide shortage going on. Obama and the Dems really are the best thing to happen to the gun making industry in recent memory.
Not really relevant to the question. There isn’t much question that gun sales are up, the point is that it seems to be driven by gun-owners buying ever more weapons, even as the actual number of gun-owners shrink.
Your thread title, and the implications thereof are misleading. The article says the share of households with a firearm has been decreasing from 50% in 1972 to 34% in 2012. But the number of households with guns is actually going up - there were 63 million households in 1970, vs 116 million in 2007. So the total number of household with guns has actually increased from around 32 million to 39 million. So while the percentage decrease may have political implications as the article suggests, you’d still expect TOTAL gun sale numbers to be up.
Sit, you’re right. I hate it when I do this – read something the way I want it to be and not the way it is. I’m going to ask the mods to close the thread because it’s based on a false premise.
They are–somebody had a quote a few gun threads back saying that the 250-300 million gun estimate was about ten years out of date, and we’re probably pushing 400 million guns now. However, the majority of gun sales in the past ten years have been to people who already had at least one gun, and many AR-15 owners now own several. So, we’re seeing lots of gun sales, more (but not lots more) new gun owners, and previous gun owners with lots more guns.