<
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/15/americans-bought-150m-guns-decade-sandy-hook-shooting>
"Americans bought an estimated 150m guns in the past decade, as a drumbeat of
mass shootings and other violence has convinced more people that owning a gun
for self-defense will make them safer.
In a country where the leading cause of gun death is gun suicide, public health
experts say a growth in gun ownership is likely to lead to more deaths.
In the 10 years since the mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school, the US
gun safety movement has gained some political power, while the National Rifle
Association has been weakened by internal disputes and legal battles. At the
same time, overall gun ownership in the US appears to have grown.
People who choose to own guns are still a minority of the US population, with
about a third of Americans saying they personally own a gun, and fewer than
half saying they live in a house with a gun, according to survey estimates.
But the total number of American gun owners appears to have risen in recent
years. One large survey conducted by Harvard and Northeastern University
researchers estimates that the number of American gun owners rose by 20 million
since 2015, from an estimated 55 million to 75 million people.
The number of Americans who choose to carry guns in public also appears to be
rising, with 16 million people saying in 2019 that they carried a handgun at
least once a month, and 6 million saying they did so daily, according to a new
research study. That’s roughly double the number who said they regularly
carried handguns in public in 2015.
Surveys over the past few decades show that an increasing proportion of
Americans say they own a gun for self-defense, not hunting or recreation, said
Deborah Azrael, a Harvard firearms researcher. In 2021, Gallup found, 88%
percent of gun owners cited “crime protection” as their reason for owning a
firearm.
Americans’ perception of the risk of crime and violence has often not lined up
with reality: Gallup also found that, for nearly three decades, large
majorities of Americans said almost every year that crime had risen nationally
since the year before, even in the years when it was falling sharply. In 2013,
Pew found that the majority of the public was simply unaware that the country’s
gun homicide rate had fallen nearly 50% since 1993."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
