Study: Americans Overwhelmingly Own Firearms for Protection

Opinion

NRA members know that there are plenty of excellent ways to exercise Second Amendment rights, such as continuing America’s hunting heritage, enjoying or competing in the shooting sports, or developing a firearm collection. However, the most important aspect of the Second Amendment is that it preserves the individual right to keep and bear arms to defend oneself, family, and community.

A new study published in the journal Injury Prevention on July 25 shows that protection is the overwhelming reason Americans exercise their Second Amendment rights. Titled, “Firearm ownership for protection in the USA, 2023: results from a nationally representative survey,” the authors from the University of Michigan found, “Of all firearm owners, 78.8%… owned a firearm for protection.”

Moreover, the results suggest that more than half of gun owners at least sometimes exercise their Right-to-Carry.”

“The researchers determined, “58.1%… carried a firearm outside their home in the last 12 months.”

As the researchers pointed out, the percentage of gun owners who cite protection as their reason for owning a firearm has increased in recent years. Further, the results comport with other research on this topic. A Pew Research Center survey from June 2023 found that 72-percent of gun owners cited protection as a “major reason” they own a gun and 91-percent cited it as a “major” or “minor” reason.

Another interesting excerpt from the Injury Prevention article found,

Gender and race/ethnicity emerged as robust sociodemographic correlates for ownership for protection. Women, black and Hispanic people were more likely to own firearms for protection than for other reasons. Decision tree analyses identified that black and Asian women (98.8%) almost exclusively owned for protection and, while men had a lower overall prevalence, owning for protection was more common among black (88.4%) than white men (69.7%; figure 2). Other characteristics, including political affiliation, were not significantly associated with motivation for firearm ownership;

This suggests that when anti-gun politicians target the types of firearms most useful for protection they are disproportionately harming women and minority gun owners.

As one might expect, some of the regime press wasn’t too keen on the results out of Ann Arbor. In a supposed news item on the study, that read more like an opinion piece, a CNN writer felt the need to refute the effectiveness of firearms for self-defense. The piece stated, “data from the National Crime Victimization Survey shows that guns are rarely used in self-defense during personal contact crimes.”

This ignores the profound evidence showing that firearms are used for protection at least hundreds of thousands of times per year.

In 1993, Florida State University Criminology Professor Gary Kleck conducted the National Self-Defense Survey to study the prevalence of defensive gun uses (DGUs), the results of which were published in a 1995 Journal of Law and Criminology article titled, “Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun.” The article stated that survey data indicated that “each year in the U.S. there are about 2.2 to 2.5 million DGUs of all types by civilians against humans.”

After Kleck’s findings were published, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conducted its own surveys of DGUs in its Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System survey from 1996 to 1998. However, the agency didn’t make its research public at the time – perhaps because the results did not conform to the CDC’s institutional anti-gun bias.

The CDC survey data finally came to light in 2018. Analyzing the CDC survey along with his own survey, Kleck found that the CDC data indicated that there are likely more than 1 million DGUs per year.

A subsequent survey, conducted in 2021 by Georgetown University Political Economist William English, placed the number of DGUs somewhere in between what the CDC and Kleck’s survey data indicated. In a research paper summarizing his findings, English noted,

The survey further finds that approximately a third of gun owners (31.1%) have used a firearm to defend themselves or their property, often on more than one occasion, and it estimates that guns are used defensively by firearms owners in approximately 1.67 million incidents per year.

Regardless of the media naysayers, gun rights supporters should take heart in that the data clearly show that an enormous portion, at the very least in the tens of millions, of Americans own firearms to exercise their Second Amendment right to armed self-defense.

About NRA-ILA:

Established in 1975, the Institute for Legislative Action (ILA) is the “lobbying” arm of the National Rifle Association of America. ILA is responsible for preserving the right of all law-abiding individuals in the legislative, political, and legal arenas, to purchase, possess, and use firearms for legitimate purposes as guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Visit: www.nra.org