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The recent Florida school shooting and its causes has been addressed on this site in this question, which addresses whether factors other than access to guns are significant, based on statements by the Governor of Kentucky suggesting that factors such as the prevalence of violent video games were more important.

The governor has made several statements on this topic. In this interview on YouTube he repeats several related claims. But the specific one, not apparently addressed elsewhere here, is this (I hope I'm transcribing his words accurately. The statement starts about 10s into the clip.):

...a hundred years ago and even fifty years ago we had more guns per capita than we do now. It's not a gun problem.

Are his specific claims about the trend in the number of guns in the USA correct (specifically that the USA now has a lower level of gun availability than it used to have)?

F1Krazy
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matt_black
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  • There are numerous graphs on the web from reputable sources (some from pro-gun outfits) that show that gun ownership has increased and is at or near a record high for the past 50-100 years. (I previously posted several links, but someone's deleted them.) – Daniel R Hicks Feb 25 '18 at 13:18
  • Question for moderators: what happened to the comments on this question? There were several useful ones but they disappeared very quickly. – matt_black Feb 25 '18 at 13:28
  • @DanielRHicks I saw some of the in my mobile feed but they had all gone by the time I returned home to my desktop. I've no idea why. – matt_black Feb 25 '18 at 13:29
  • It's fairly clear that one of the moderators has a strong pro-gun stance. – Daniel R Hicks Feb 25 '18 at 13:34
  • @DanielRHicks My first explanation would actually be a software glitch (there have been some serious ones in the last week here). Moderators have *explained* their actions on the [other big question on guns](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/40718/are-violent-video-games-a-better-explanation-of-school-shootings-than-access-to), for example. – matt_black Feb 25 '18 at 13:38
  • The simple explanation is that answers should not be posted in comments. The only thing that should appear in comments is constructive criticism of the question (or answer for comments on answers). If people are posting links for some reason other than suggesting changes in the question, then they should be deleted. That's true on any site and tends to be enforced more heavily on controversial questions. – Brythan Feb 26 '18 at 22:46
  • This is the first time I have noticed this conversation. The idea that comments were deleted due to a political bias is complete nonsense. The idea that it was because pseudo-answers shouldn't be posted in comments - especially by users who have been told not to do it before - is spot on. – Oddthinking Mar 08 '20 at 15:42

2 Answers2

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TL;DR: No, not guns per capita, but the reverse, percentage of households with guns is decreasing.

This may have simply been clumsy speaking. Guns per capita is increasing while the percentage of households with guns is decreasing. CNN:

The number of households owning guns has declined from almost 50% in 1973 to just over 32% in 2010, according to a 2011 study produced by The University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center. The number of gun owners has gone down almost 10% over the same period, the report found

Another way of saying this is that the number of guns per gun owner is increasing faster than the number of gun owners (on a percentage basis) is decreasing.

Brythan
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    Taken together, these two facts mean that the civilian gun stock is increasingly looking like a small number of people who each own a larger and larger number of guns. – probably_someone Feb 25 '18 at 04:46
  • I'd be interested to see alternative estimates of the "households with a gun" stats and a discussion of their reliability. I've seen some longer term estimates that fluctuate without a strong trend and also the shorter term ones with a decline. It seems important to know whether some of the "strong decline" results are cherry picking. – matt_black Feb 25 '18 at 12:09
  • There are credible claims that half of all guns are owned by about 3% of households. – Daniel R Hicks Feb 25 '18 at 13:21
  • A pro-gun site named Gun Facts has a chart showing handguns nearly doubling since 1973: http://www.gunfacts.info/gun-control-myths/crime-and-guns/ – Daniel R Hicks Feb 25 '18 at 13:27
  • @probably_someone: A small fraction of a large number is still quite a large number. – Ben Voigt Feb 25 '18 at 19:31
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    @BenVoigt This isn't quite true; one 300-millionth of 300 million is 1, which isn't a large number by most people's standards. Anyway, I don't see how that's relevant to this discussion. Care to elaborate? – probably_someone Feb 25 '18 at 19:48
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    @probably_someone: It's relevant to your first comment, where you said a small number of people own a large number of guns. Using Daniel's figure of 3% of the households for 50% of the guns (which is consistent with the "80-20 rule" that appears in many areas), that 3% is a "small fraction", but is on the order of 10 million people, definitely not a small number of people like you first said. – Ben Voigt Feb 25 '18 at 19:53
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    @BenVoigt 10 million is a small number of people; for instance, it's much smaller than 300 million people. – probably_someone Feb 25 '18 at 19:56
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    @probably_someone: It's not a small number of people, it's 8 times more people than there are in the US armed forces. – Ben Voigt Feb 25 '18 at 20:10
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    @BenVoigt Who said that the size of the army was the boundary between a "small number of people" and a "large number of people"? More to the point, why is 10 million being a "large number of people" (by your definition) even important? What's your point? – probably_someone Feb 25 '18 at 20:13
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    @probably_someone - Where's your certification as an authority on the meaning of "large" and "small"? – Daniel R Hicks Feb 25 '18 at 21:10
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    @DanielRHicks I never said I was an authority. The point is that nobody is an authority, and as such, I can use subjective terms like "large" or "small" in the way that I did, as long as the context of relative comparison is clear. Here, I had thought that it was clear that a "small number" of people was reasonably going to be interpreted as a comparison between the number of people who own guns now and the number of people who owned guns in the past. – probably_someone Feb 25 '18 at 21:17
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    @DanielRHicks Also, I wasn't even the one trying to act as an authority in this case. After all, it was Ben who said, "That isn't a small number." – probably_someone Feb 25 '18 at 21:18
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    @probably_someone -- I think it is clear that the use of "large" or "small", in such contexts, is meaningless unless accompanied by some explanatory text. It is reasonable to complain that the terms are too vague to belong in Skeptics, but unreasonable to argue here what they "mean". (And you were the first here to abuse "small" in this fashion.) – Daniel R Hicks Feb 25 '18 at 21:21
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    "Taken together, these two facts mean that the civilian gun stock is increasingly looking like a **small number** of people who each own a larger and larger number of guns. – probably_someone" – Daniel R Hicks Feb 25 '18 at 21:22
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    @DanielRHicks The explanatory text was implied in the answer above, which is reasonable because this was a comment on that answer. Taking things out of context will always make them meaningless. And I wasn't arguing for any particular meaning; rather, I was objecting to Ben's attempt to use his definition of "small" to refute mine. So, by your logic, I wasn't the one being unreasonable here, as Ben didn't even try to complain that "small" was too vague; he simply said my number wasn't small. – probably_someone Feb 25 '18 at 21:26
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    @DanielRHicks But if you're really that concerned aboit semantics, here's a revised version of my first statement: "Taken together, these two facts mean that the civilian gun stock is increasingly looking like a shrinking minority of the population who each own a larger and larger number of guns." It essentially doesn't change my point. – probably_someone Feb 25 '18 at 21:54
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    I would note this data is self reported. I would not be totally surprised to learn that underreporting changes over the decades, and I would guess that with the fear of confiscation being spread recently it would be higher than average now. –  Feb 26 '18 at 16:25
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    The problem with that report (sourced from, I think the GSS) is that other reports contradict it. [This Guardian article](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/25/gun-ownership-us-data) for example compares Gallup data to GSS data and the Gallup report shows little change since 1970 in households with a gun in self-reported surveys. A comparison of such dissimilar sources and their limitations would make a much better answer. – matt_black Mar 01 '18 at 15:15
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There doesn't seem to be much public data on the number of guns per capita one hundred years ago, but the part saying that "fifty years ago we had more guns per capita than we do now" is definitely incorrect. Quoting from a Congressional Research Service white paper on the issue of gun control (found here: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL32842.pdf):

Per capita, the civilian gun stock has roughly doubled since 1968, from one gun per every two persons to one gun per person.

probably_someone
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  • I'd be interested to see a discussion of alternative estimates which might give us an idea of the reliability of the conclusions. single sources are always a little suspect. – matt_black Feb 25 '18 at 12:11
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    @matt_black - Google "gun ownership by year in us" and look at the "images". You will easily find a dozen sites which confirm the basic statement in this answer (many of them from pro-gun sites wanting to take credit for falling gun deaths). – Daniel R Hicks Feb 25 '18 at 13:31
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    @DanielRHicks I'd be interested to see a credible review of those looking at the original sources and reliability of the data (eg, although it isn't the most relevant stat here, the "households owning a gun" stats are somewhat contradictory). – matt_black Feb 25 '18 at 13:35
  • @matt_black - Google the charts, go to the pages they're on, and see what sources they quote. (And while you're doing this you will note that the data is remarkably consistent, even between far-left and far-right sites.) – Daniel R Hicks Feb 25 '18 at 13:45
  • I might well do that if nobody else does it first. But I like to give others the chance to produce robust answers to my questions before I do. – matt_black Feb 25 '18 at 13:47
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    @matt_black The main issue with finding multiple original credible sources for this matter is that the US government has been severely restricted from funding or publishing gun violence research for 20 years, due to the Dickey and Tiahrt amendments. Incidentally, the Dickey amendment in particular was mainly pushed by an NRA lobbying group; make of that what you will. – probably_someone Feb 25 '18 at 19:17