Friday, July 26, 2013

Are There Really a 100 Million Gun Owners?


A Pew Research Center survey in early May found that 41% of adults reported having a gun in their household: 27% said they personally owned a gun, and 14% said the gun or guns in their home were owned by someone else.
There is a substantial gender gap when it comes to gun ownership: men are almost three times as likely as women (40% vs. 14%) to personally own a gun. However, women are more likely than men (by 22% to 6%) to live with someone else who owns a gun. Overall, 46% of men live in a gun-owning household compared with 36% of women.
Gun ownership also differs substantially by region. Higher percentages in the Midwest (29%) and South (30%) say they own a gun. It’s less common in the Northeast (19%) and the West (25%).
You know what I'm wondering right now? How does 27% of the adult population translate into 100 million gun owners?

Answer: it doesn't.  It doesn't even come close.

You know, the longer you stick around the gun debate, the more lies you uncover on the part of the pro-gun fanatics. They invent them because they sound good and because they support their losing position, and then they repeat them over and over again, thoughtlessly, stupidly.

What's your opinion?  Please leave a comment.

25 comments:

  1. "27% said they personally owned a gun, and 14% said the gun or guns in their home were owned by someone else."

    41% of 300,000,000 comes to 123 million. There is no mention of sample size for this survey, so this might be a result similar to the infamous 40% statistic regarding the "gun show loophole" where the true sample size was 251.

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    1. To get GUN OWNERS, you don't add those two things. That's pretty bad. You're usually a bit more honest than that. You've been hanging around with Greg too much.

      Adult pop. is 240 million. 27% is about 65 million.

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    2. You can also figure that a decent number of gun owners refuse to self identify as such because they don't trust the pollster to keep the answers confidential. No good way to estimate that number, however, without pulling it out of one's rear.

      I will say that the figure for the South seems kind of low, even if we consider that large cities like Memphis and Atlanta will have lower rates than the surrounding areas.

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    3. So you'd only disarm the gun owner? You wouldn't disarm the entire house because a binge drinker lives there? When a woman answers that she doesn't own guns, but lives in a household with guns, it would be ok for the binge drinking husband to transfer his guns to her, right?

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    4. Oh no, the whole house has to be disarmed.

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    5. Because it's never enough to violate the rights of just one person...

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    6. Then using your preferred poll data, it's not 65 million people, it's everyone who lives in the house. Surely over 100 million.

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    7. No, when you count gun owners you count gun owners. When you disarm gun owners, you have to disarm everyone in the house.

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    8. Should the other residents of the house be barred from voting if there's a felon living there?

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    9. No, not voting. But access to guns has to be a practical consideration. If dad is declared disqualified, mom can't have guns in the house. One need only think about the Lanza household.

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    10. And so, when you say that you want to disarm 50% of gun owners, we should also read in that you want to disarm the gun owners you're ok with if they live with someone who fits into that 50%. Therefore, when we start calculating in the number of folks in each household who might be disqualified, we shouldn't be surprised if 95% to 100% of gun owners are disarmed--maybe because of a college student who binges at school, or maybe because the 13 year old is clumsy and has been seen bumping into door frames and tripping.


      But I'm sure I'm just being dishonest here and misrepresenting your statements by combining them and following them to their logical end.

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    11. So if a person lives with a felon, you're not worried about the good citizen voting the way the felon wants?

      O.K., how about government benefits? If one person in the household is a felon, should everyone be kicked out of public housing? After all, they're tolerating a criminal on the public dime.

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  2. 41% of the adults have access to (I assume) a legal gun in their home according to the survey. Isn't that the number that would really count? Don't you count the CT shooter as a "gun owner" even though he used his mother's weapons in shooting up the school?

    P.S. thanks for turning off the comment moderation - it makes things flow smoother in the comments.

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    1. No. A gun owner is not one who lives in the same home as a gun owner.

      Greg keeps saying "100 million gun owners." The true number, we now see is about 65 million.

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    2. "A gun owner is not one who lives in the same home as a gun owner."

      Mike you made me laugh when I read that, no offense meant. But I do know what you meant tho.

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    3. "A Pew Research Center survey in early May found that 41% of adults reported having a gun in their household:"

      Actually the adult population of the US according to the census is 234,000,000, 41% of that is about 95.5 million. Did you post the article because you thought it inaccurate? It would help if they had posted a number for no gun responses. I've never worried about how many people have firearms. Rights aren't something you get more of if there are more of you.

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    4. I base my number on the Gallup poll that found 47& of Americans had a gun. Actually, I was rounding down.

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    5. Sure you were, Greg. Either that or you were repeating something that you heard and thought sounded cool.

      Now we know that a number like 47% includes non gun owners who live in homes with guns. That's not the same.

      New number: 65 million.

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    6. ssgmarkcr, we're not talking about people who have guns in the household. Look at it this way. Dad is a gun owner. He has a wife and three young kids. Do you count that as 1 gun owner or 5?

      These are the ways you guys have inflated the number of gun owners. The true numeber is about 65 million.

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    7. Feel free to believe whatever you wish, Mikeb. I don't have to agree.

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    8. Mike,

      The questions asked have the potential to underreport the number of gun owners. For example, if the person responds that someone else owns the gun or guns in the house says yes, it gets counted as one. We dont know if for example, they asked if someone else owns the guns in the house in response to the person interviewed said he didnt own one. There could be more than one adult gun owner in the household.
      We have been discussing the number of adults in the US and the poll specifies its a percentage of adults, so why are we bringing up the number of young kids?
      It really isnt terribly important whether there are 65, 100, or 10 million. Rights are individual.

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    9. That's funny about staying up late to correct someone on the internet.

      But, the number is important when your side keeps quoting it as almost double what it really is.

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    10. Mikeb, do you understand what estimation means? Fortunately, there is no centrally compiled list of all gun owners, so these numbers are all estimates. But here's something for you to chew on. Why do you accept this estimate, based on a survey with a particular sample size, when you reject estimates of defensive gun uses, based on surveys with similar sample sizes? I acknowledge that the margin of error is high in the latter case, but even so, the number there is at least in the hundreds of thousands. You refuse to acknowledge that the number of gun owners has a large margin of error for all the reasons that we've discussed and so 100,000,000 is a good estimate.

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  3. This is a poll, information volunteered. I see many different polls on gun ownership, from 40 million to 165 million and they all claim to have the "true numbers".

    The problem with polls it relies totally someone asked to tell the truth. Well good luck with that. If someone thinks its none of your business they are going to lie to you, or lie to you just to screw with you. I answered just such a poll years back. Told them NO, I don't own nor would I ever own guns. See? I lied! None of their business. How am I supposed to know if its a true poll, or someone scoping me out to see if I have guns to mark my place to target later.

    Gun registration is illegal, so should be such polls.

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    1. I did that as well. None of their business what I own or don't own.

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