Americans Own Over 415 Million Firearms

Houston Gun Show at the George R. Brown Convention Center. Wikimedia  

The Volokh Conspiracy/Reason: "Americans Own Over 415 Million Firearms,"  

"consisting of approximately 171 million handguns, 146 million rifles, and 98 million shotguns." There are also estimates of AR-15 ownership and ownership of magazines that hold over 10 rounds (which some state laws classify as "large-capacity"). 

There's a new survey aimed at determining patterns of gun ownership and defensive gun use, from Prof. William English at the Georgetown University. It's much larger than most other such surveys, with over 54,000 adult American respondents, of whom over 16,700 personally owned guns. 

It measures some things that others have already measured—for instance, its estimate of the adult firearms ownership rate, 32%, is on par with other surveys. (Some other surveys also try to estimate what fraction of households contains at least one gun; this one didn't, though in response to my e-mail Prof. English wrote, "the individual gun ownership estimates are very much in line with other recent surveys that asked about ownership at the individual level; and some of these also asked about household ownership (Pew, Gallup), generally finding household rates in the 42-44% range.") But the survey also gives us some data that has rarely been gathered before, including (items reordered):  

Read more ....  

WNU Editor: That is a lot of weapons in the general American public.