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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.
I’m thinking the self defense claim is boosted by activist owners who want to bolster support for gun ownership on a survey. There is simply no chance that 44% of black gun owners have used their gun in self defense.
However I see no reason to lie about AR ownership, and this makes me happy because AR ownership is double-plus bad in the eyes of gun restrictionists. So, all those AR owners are making a statement 100% opposed to the propaganda about the AR, just by continuing to own them.
I don't know. Yes, it seems high but if we're counting incidents where a gun was drawn but not fired a 1/4th to a 1/3rd of gun owners having used their guns in self defense strikes me as fairly plausible given my own experience.
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