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Visualizing the 2021 National Firearms Survey
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/visualizing-the-2021-national-firearms
tags: [guns][self promotion][data visualization]
Summary:
William English of Georgetown collaborated with Centiment to poll 54,244 people about gun ownership, and develop a detailed picture of what ratio of the country owns guns, what kinds, what ratio of the country has used a gun in self defense, and such. It's the largest and most detailed attempt ever made in this research space as far as I'm aware, and I'm aware of many such attempts by academics. This article graphs a lot of his results, but instead of graphing them within the context of the research, graphs them against other known quantities to put them into wider perspective.
Findings:
There are 33% more people in the USA who own AR-15 styled rifles than the entire Asian population.
There are approximately as many people in the USA who own magazines larger than 10 round capacity as there are black people.
"Assault weapons bans" would generally require 12% of the entire population to register their firearms or be in felonious noncompliance, a number of people roughly equal to the entire population of California
By ratio, this is equal to 2012 people required to register for every 1 firearm homicide
There are 19 times more AR-15 owners than the entire active duty rolls of the US military
There are 410 times more AR-15 owners than there were Taliban fighters at the time the US military lost to the Taliban
There are 14,000 AR-15 owners for every ATF field agent
Across all states, between 20% and 44% of gun owners own an AR-15 styled rifle
For every gun murder in the USA in 2020, there were 86 defensive gun uses. Note that the poll took a broad definition of DGU here, including instances where the firearm was not discharged or potentially even brandished
44% of black gun owners have used a gun in self defense
27% of female gun owners have used a gun in self defense
Meta:
Nice site you got here folks! I'm curious whether it can support different forums, so that instead of the CW thread being a thread it could simply be different posts within a separate containment forum.
One problem with the defensive gun use data is that it relies on self-reporting, and one person's "I defended myself with a firearm" is another person's "you needlessly escalated a conflict." For example, these two gentlemen both believed that they were acting in self-defense, yet both were convicted of murder
Of course, that type of problem is not unique to that question and that issue, but rather is a problem that is inherent to this type of research, and one which should be kept in mind, regardless of the topic at hand.
Self-reporting is a flaw, but it is with all survey questions. Either surveys tell us nothing because it's self-reports, or they tell us something and we have to scrabble through the phrasing and operationalization to figure out what that is.
The study did use a very broad definition of "defensive gun use", and may have been misunderstood by some fraction of respondents. I think we can safely surmise that the numbers the survey presents are a theoretical maximum, the true number is almost certainly smaller, but might not be much smaller.
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There used to be a very useful subreddit dgu (defensive gun use) that collected published media reports of defensive gun uses. It was pretty impressive how many there were considering they had to meet the threshold that a media organization published an article about them.
There still is, but there used to be too.
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