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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.
Some cases of AR ownership are even a step further - one of the major reasons I chose to purchase an AR-15 is because of the political valence around it and proposed ATF restrictions. Yes, it's also fun to shoot at the range and could serve as a quality home defense weapon, but I could have just as easily chosen something else that fits that description. I don't know how many people are in a similar boat, but I don't think I'm all unusual of a gun owner.
To be honest, the AR-15 platform is literally the best platform for doing what it does, which is standoff gun fights at intermediate ranges. All the other semiauto carbines are functionally inferior in my opinion, and I've shot a lot of them. Other guns really only shine over the AR-15 in specialized circumstances where the AR-15 has a specific disadvantage. Indoors, for instance, a PCC is probably better. At range, a 30 cal of some kind is probably better. Add in the fact that the AR-15 platform is almost infinitely customizable, and gives men the sorts of barbie doll accessorization fix they used to get from tinkering on cars, and it's no surprise they'd be popular. It's really pretty much the best gun you can buy for that particular task. It's just a great gun design.
The AR platform is only customizable to the degree it is in a post-GWOT, post-M4 carbine world. Even then you still have gas tuning peculiarities between various gas system lengths/blocks, buffer lengths/weights. Direct Impingement with the buffer system trades some weight and some softness in recoil for a lot of dirty gas in critical areas all the way down into the magazines. The buffer system also makes folding the stock for portability require an expensive adapter that still can't fire in that configuration so most folks disassemble the rifle for that use case. The design is mid and it survives because of half a century of government funding leading to wide availability of critical and add-on parts.
Well, it always was capable of that.
The trick about the AR-15 is that it's trivial for anyone with a CNC mill and a couple of aluminum billets to churn out the entire gun. Older designs rely on stamping and welding (or casting and milling), and newer ones require plastic and/or aluminum extruding machinery. Startup costs are correspondingly high- Tommybuilt has to charge over 3 times the amount for a G36 clone as Aero Precision does (who aren't even natively a firearms manufacturer to begin with), and the Aero is lighter and more accurate to boot.
Hence the market for attachments- it's legitimately the only gun that can take anywhere near that kind of modification, and those OEMs need parts other than what they can machine on the router.
Milling or forging the upper is not trivial. No one focuses on that because when the BATFE categorized what part of the AR was a controlled item they were concerned about full-auto uses and so picked the lower since traditional AR full auto configurations have a different fire control + sear pocket and drop-in auto sears were a later innovation. Stamp, bend and weld at scale is cheaper and faster than milling and forging. Especially when you have to mill along more than one axis. The T(G)36 clone costs are a mix of niche product, complex plastic receiver from a small shop and sourcing HK parts for all the rest.
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