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.