Gun owners are an ever-shrinking minority in every section of the country, according to a front-page, above-the-fold story in today's New York Times.
Overall, household gun ownership has shrunk from 50 percent 40 years ago to
about 33 percent today. Even in the South, gun ownership is down from 65 percent in the 1970s to less than 40 percent now.
Of course, gun sales have been higher lately, thanks to continual NRA scare campaigns coordinated with the gun industry.
In short, fewer, older people own more guns.
More below.
The data come from the General Social Survey, conducted by the University of Chicago with funding from the National Science Foundation. The survey has asked about gun ownership, among other questions, since 1973.
Highlights include:
The rate has dropped in cities large and small, in suburbs and rural areas and in all regions of the country. It has fallen among households with children, and among those without. It has declined for households that say they are very happy, and for those that say they are not. It is down among churchgoers and those who never sit in pews.
snip
(The results reflect) two evolving patterns in American life: the decline of hunting and a sharp drop in violent crime, which has made the argument for self-protection much less urgent.
snip
While household ownership of guns among elderly Americans remained virtually unchanged from the 1970s to this decade at about 43 percent, ownership among young Americans plummeted. Household gun ownership among Americans under the age of 30 fell to 23 percent this decade from 47 percent in the 1970s. The survey showed a similar decline for Americans ages 30 to 44.
snip
The survey showed a steep drop in household gun ownership among Democrats and independents, and a very slight decline among Republicans. But the new data suggest a reversal among Republicans, with 51 percent since 2008 saying they have a gun in their home, up from 47 percent in surveys taken from 2000 through 2006. This leaves the Republican rate a bit below where it was in the 1970s, while ownership for Democrats is nearly half of what it was in that decade.
snip
While the rate of gun ownership among women has remained relatively constant over the years at about 10 percent, which is less than one-third of the rate among men today, more women are heading households without men, another possible contributor to the decline in household gun ownership. Women living in households where there were guns that were not their own declined to a fifth in 2012 down from a third in 1980.
The increase of Hispanics as a share of the American population is also probably having an effect, as they are far less likely to own guns. In the survey results since 2000, about 14 percent of Hispanics reported having a gun in their house.
The NRA response is typical, a flack points to increased gun sales and background checks as "evidence" that the survey is wrong:
I’m sure there are a lot of people who would love to make the case that there are fewer gun owners in this country, but the stories we’ve been hearing and the data we’ve been seeing simply don’t support that.
Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, rebuts the NRA BS:
There are all these claims that gun ownership is going through the roof. But I suspect the increase in gun sales has been limited mostly to current gun owners. The most reputable surveys show a decline over time in the share of households with guns.
With gun safety, as with many other issues, an ever-smaller minority of Americans have been propagandized and activated by self-interested corporations and their allies in the media to resist common-sense reforms preferred by the vast majority.
The results of this latest General Social Survey, and its prominent placement in the nation's leading newspaper, will hopefully have some effect on the 9/11-a-month death toll that guns wreak on our people.