The Number and Type of Private Firearms in the United States

• Published date: 01 November 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00027162231164855
• Author: John Berrigan,Deborah Azrael,Matthew Miller
• Date: 01 November 2022
• Subject Matter: The Changing Composition of Gun Violence

70 ANNALS, AAPSS, 704, November 2022

DOI: 10.1177/00027162231164855

The Number

and Type of

Private

Firearms in the

United States

By

JOHN BERRIGAN,

DEBORAH AZRAEL,

and

MATTHEW MILLER

1164855ANN THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMYNUMBER AND TYPE OF PRIVATE FIREARMS IN THE U.S.

research-article2023

Since 2015, tens of millions of guns have entered the

U.S. market. Using household survey data, we found

that the number of firearms owned by U.S. adults

increased from 265 million in 2015 to 326 million in

2019. Over this period, the proportion of firearms that

were handguns increased slightly, from 42 to 44 per-

cent, continuing a long-standing trend. Seventy percent

of handguns were pistols (102 million) and 30 percent

revolvers (43 million); 5.7 million were stored in cars.

Sixty-three percent of long guns were rifles (113 mil-

lion); 37 percent were shotguns (65 million). Of the 40

percent of rifles that were semiautomatic, half were

described as military-style rifles (23 million) and half as

hunting rifles (22 million). Gun ownership was highly

concentrated: 87 percent of all firearms were owned by

the half of gun owners who owned more than two guns.

We discuss the public health and surveillance implica-

tions of these findings.

Keywords: firearms; guns; handgun; long gun; gun

stock

Correspondence: ma.miller@northeastern.edu

John Berrigan, a graduate of Northeastern University,

is currently a third-year medical student at University

of Kansas Medical School. He has led several firearm

related peer-reviewed studies in collaboration with Drs.

Azrael and Miller, including the present one. He plans

on continuing to pursue and integrate his dual interests

in public health research and clinical medicine.

Deborah Azrael is director of research at the Harvard

Injury Control Research Center and has over 25 years’

experience conducting and leading grant-funded

research on firearm violence, injury surveillance, and

suicide prevention. She was the codirector of the pilot

for what became the National Violent Death Reporting

System.

Matthew Miller is a professor of health sciences and

epidemiology at Northeastern University, adjunct pro-

fessor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public

Health, and codirector of the Harvard Injury Control

Research Center. His research focuses on injury and

violence prevention, with a focus on firearm-related

injury and suicide prevention.

NUMBER AND TYPE OF PRIVATE FIREARMS IN THE U.S. 71

Introduction

The U.S. is widely acknowledged to have the largest stock of civilian-held fire-

arms in the world (Ingraham 2018). Nevertheless, despite the year-on-year toll of

firearm-related death—approximately 40,000 Americans annually over recent

years (WISQARS [Web-Based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System]

2021)—no ongoing data source provides information on the size or composition

of the U.S. gun stock, or about how firearms of different types (e.g., handguns,

shotguns, rifles) distribute across U.S. gun owners. Indeed, although numerous

surveys, including the biannual General Social Survey (GSS), ask respondents

whether they live in a household with a gun and/or personally own a gun, few

have asked about the number of guns respondents own, let alone more detailed

questions about these firearms. To the best of our knowledge, only three nation-

ally representative surveys, one in 1994 (Cook and Ludwig 1997), one in 2004

(Hepburn et al. 2007), and another in 2015 (Azrael et al. 2017) have used

respondents’ enumeration of the number and types of firearms they own to

extrapolate to the U.S. population overall. The most recent of these surveys

found that that between 1994 and 2015, the U.S. gun stock had grown from

approximately 192 million to 265 million firearms and that the number of hand-

guns in civilian hands had grown from approximately 65 million (constituting

one-third of the U.S. gun stock), to approximately 135 million (and 42 percent of

the stock) (Azrael et al. 2017).

Since 2015, the fraction of U.S. adults who personally own a gun increased

from approximately 22 percent in 2015 to almost 26 percent in 2020 (based on

estimates from the GSS) (Davern et al. 2020), and tens of millions of guns

entered the U.S. retail gun market, (“Firearms Commerce in the United States”

2021); but no information is available about how these guns are distributed across

U.S. gun owners. In this article, we use data from the 2019 National Firearm

Survey (2019 NFS), a nationally representative survey of adults in gun owning

households, to update the estimate of the number of guns in the U.S., and to

provide more detailed information on the size, composition and distribution of

the U.S. gun stock.

Methods

The 2019 NFS1 was conducted by the research firm Ipsos from July 30 to August

11, 2019. Respondents were drawn from Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel (KP), an online

sampling frame comprising approximately 55,000 U.S. adults recruited using

address-based sampling methods.

The panel study members report whether they live in a home with firearms

when they enroll in KP, and the information is updated approximately annually.

Invitations to participate in the survey were sent only to adults who reported that

they lived in a home with firearms. All panel members who reported living in a

household with a gun, except those on active duty in the U.S. Armed Forces,

were eligible to participate. Email invitations for the survey contained a link that