Saturday, November 03, 2007

Long gun ownership on the decline




As a follow-up on the post about the decline of hunting, I generated these stacked bar charts showing trends in the household ownership of rifles, shotguns, and pistols. You can see that fewer people own either type of long gun which matches the dropping interest in hunting. The rate of handgun ownership, by contrast, seemed to grow very slightly until about a decade ago, probably in response to fear of crime, and may be slipping a bit more recently as crime rates have fallen. The NRA and all lovers of self-reliance must not be too happy about these trends.

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous3:21 PM

    Please control for urban vs rural habitation. This is meaningless unless you do that.

    ReplyDelete

Are gun owners mentally ill?

  Some anti-gun people think owning a gun is a sign of some kind of mental abnormality. According to General Social Survey data, gun owners ...