Articles like this are usually paywalled, but the editors successfully negotiated with the journal to have all of the articles in this issue available as “open access.” So click and enjoy “Gun Culture 2.0: The Evolution and Contours of Defensive Gun Ownership in America” (link to the article on the journal’s website).

If you want to go straight to the text, here’s a PDF of the article.

There is a lot that is unique about this article (IMHO), but I want to note in particular the first section of the part on The Early Evolution of America’s Gun Culture called “The human-weapon relationship and the normality of guns.”

Those who follow me closely have heard me talk about the work Randy Miyan is doing as executive director of the Liberal Gun Owners, especially his Liberal Gun Owner Lens. The first pillar of the LGO Lens focuses on “the human-weapon relationship.” It is a thorough analysis of the uniquely human and culturally universal use of projectile weaponry that provides the foundation for widespread contemporary civilian gun ownership in the United States.

That is, the anthropological and archaeological normality of the 300,000-year-old Homo Sapiens Projectile Club is the basis for the sociological normality of guns today.

Thanks for reading beyond the headline. If you appreciate this or some of the other 1000+ posts on this blog, please consider supporting my research and writing on American gun culture by liking and sharing my work.

My appearance was broken into two separate segments (S2G35 and S2G36) and followed two segments with fellow half-Japanese-American (but also half-Chinese American) Chris Cheng (S2G33 and S2G34).

Although I am not an expert in mass violence, I appreciate the opportunity to reflect on issues that hit very close to home and do so from a very personal perspective at times.

Of course, I typically turn to statistics before getting personal on these issues. The following is the documentation for some of the empirical claims I make during these episodes.

I first observe that the Half Moon Bay shooter was not a U.S. citizen. I mention this only because a 2019 Gallup poll found that 42% of Americans believe immigrants are making the crime situation worse in America. This is perhaps not surprising given political rhetoric that some immigrants are “bad hombres” and “animals” and come from “shithole countries.”

But according to a scholar from the (libertarian not librul) CATO Institute, illegal immigrants (in Texas) have a 45% lower criminal conviction rate than native-born American citizens and legal immigrants have a 62% lower rate. This holds across all types of crime from violent to property-related.

So, the citizenship status of the mass murderer in Half Moon Bay (and, I could add, in Monterey Park, California where the shooter was a naturalized U.S. citizen) does not seem to me to be part of the story.

What about the fact that both the Half Moon Bay and Monterey Park murderers were Asian men?

The fact that they were men almost goes without saying. The vast majority of mass shooters are men, as are mass murderers more generally.

What about the fact that they were both Asian? This, I think, is more interesting. We know that Asians are about 6% of the U.S. population but commit disproportionately fewer murders. In 2019, for example, only 1.0% of those charged with murder or nonnegligent manslaughter in the U.S. were Asian.

But study after study shows that the proportion of MASS murderers who are Asian is closer to their share of the U.S. population, and perhaps even greater than their share. That is, Asians may be overrepresented among “mass shooters” and “mass murderers” in the U.S. This holds across datasets that cover different time periods and have different definitions of “mass shooting” or “mass murder.”

The table above appears in “US Mass public shootings since Columbine: victims per incident by race and ethnicity of the perpetrator” (Preventative Medicine).

9 percent of mass public shooters in The Violence Project database for 1999-2021 are Asian, more than we would expect based on their population proportion, and much more than we would expect based on the overall Asian murder rate.

The table above, produced by Eugene Volokh of The Volokh Conspiracy, uses the Mother Jones magazine database of 121 mass shootings from 1982 to 2021. He also finds Asian mass shooters to be overrepresented relative to their population proportion.

Using a database of 308 mass murders from 2006-2014, criminologist Adam Lankford again finds the proportion of mass murderers who are Asian to be close to their population proportion, or perhaps slightly overrepresented at 6.3%. Notably, Lankford highlights that Asians are significantly overrepresented among mass murders compared to their proportion of everyday murders (1.5%, z = 6.00***).

Of course, not all mass murders are the same. Indeed, one prominent definition of “mass shooting” highlights their commission in public places (hence “mass public shooting”) and excludes those committed in the context of robbery, gang violence, or conventionally motivated crime (used by Mother Jones magazine and The Violence Project).

This is significant because, as Adam Lankford shows, there are racial differences in mass murder by attack type. Asians (and Whites) disproportionately commit family and public killings, while Black and Latino mass murders are more likely to be in the context of robbery/burglary.

The table above also highlights two other significant findings concerning Asian mass murder. First, Asian mass murders have the highest average body count (6.88, F = 4.57***). Second, Asian mass murderers are most likely to be killed (i.e., commit suicide either directly or by cop) in the commission of their crime (63% vs. 44% for Whites, 38% for Latinos, and 15% for Blacks).

These additional facts highlight the need for nuance in understanding mass murder cross-racially, a nuance that Randy Miyan and I try to emphasize in these podcast episodes.

Even as we try to find patterns and explanations, it’s also important to recognize that Asian mass murder is extremely uncommon. The Preventative Medicine study mentioned above includes 9 total cases of Asian mass shooters over a 22-year period (0.4 cases per year using The Violence Project data). Eugene Volokh’s analysis includes 8 total cases over a 40-year period (0.2 cases per year using Mother Jones data). And Adam Lankford’s data includes 15 total cases of Asian mass murderers in an 8-year period (1.875 cases per year).

My topic was “Gun Culture 2.0 and the Changing Face of Gun Owners in America.” What I was going to talk about was not new to me, but I was excited to bring my ideas about guns and gun culture to a new audience.

If you are new to my work, if you want a refresher, or ICYMI, you can get an idea of my approach to this topic both in writing and video.

Two YouTube videos from my “Light Over Heat” channel follow. The first is a 15 minute presentation I made to the Outdoor Writers Association of American in October 2021, and the second is the third Light Over Heat video I posted in January 2022. A couple of links to my writing on the issue are included as well.

I have not written anything specifically on gun owner diversity, but the idea of a changing face of gun owners appears in various places like:

—>“Gun Culture 2.0 and the Great Gun-Buying Spree of 2020,” Discourse, 2 February 2021.

—>My talk to the Lutheran Ethicists’ Network: a preprint of the paper online as a free download at SocArxiv.

There are also some very academic works that include these ideas but I will spare blog readers of those.

The special issue of the academic journal Sociological Perspectives I co-edited on “A Sociology of Firearms for the Twenty-First Century” is now published as the February 2022 issue.

Although the articles have long been available, it’s still satisfying to see them presented collectively. The articles are all open access (for now?) so grab them while you can from the journal’s website.

***The articles are paywalled, but if there are articles you are interested in seeing, please contact me and I will send them to you for educational purposes.***

My take on developing the field of gun studies in sociology can be found in the Special Issue Editors’ Introduction, co-written with my colleague Trent Steidley, but my contribution should be evident.

That’s no revelation to most gun owners, but it is a different starting point than many people take. It also raises the question, just how normal are guns and gun owners anyway?

In this post, which supplements my recent “Light Over Heat with Professor David Yamane” video (embedded below), I want to answer the question using some simple math. Read on for my calculations.

For the sake of simplicity, I want to present the normality vs. deviance of guns and gun owners as a matter of denominators and numerators. All of the figures below come with many caveats, of course.

Denominators

To align with available data for the numerators below, I use data for 2019 here*:

400,000,000 privately owned firearms in the United States (Source: Small Arms Survey)

76,560,000 US adults personally own a gun** (30% of 255.2 million adults in the US) (Sources: Pew Research Center and US Census Bureau)

51,440,000 US households have a gun** (40% of 128.6 million households in the US) (Sources: Pew Research Center and US Census Bureau)

This is prima facie evidence of the normality of guns in the US, in the sense of being something commonly owned by a lot of people.

Numerators

The normality of gun use can be seen in how INfrequent misuse of guns is relative to their commonality. Where possible, I will use data from sources that are unlikely to underestimate the misuse. Here are some important numerators we can use on negative outcomes involving guns (data from 2019 unless otherwise indicated, excluding legal interventions and justifiable defensive gun use):

Accidental deaths: 611 (Source: Gun Violence Archive)

Non-fatal intentional injuries: 2,501 (Source: JAMA Internal Medicine, Years: average of 2009-2017)

Criminal homicides: 14,861 (Source: UC Davis Health)

Suicides: 23,941 (Source: UC Davis Health)

Non-fatal criminal injuries: 34,687 (Source: JAMA Internal Medicine, Years: average of 2009-2017)

Non-fatal unintentional injuries: 43,729 (Source: JAMA Internal Medicine, Years: average of 2009-2017)

Non-fatal violent victimization***: 481,950 (Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics)

TOTAL non-fatal injuries: 84,213 (Source: JAMA Internal Medicine, Years: average of 2009-2017)

TOTAL fatalities (accidental, criminal, suicide): 39,413

TOTAL fatal + non-fatal injuries: 123,626

TOTAL fatalities + non-fatal injuries and victimization: 605,576

Numerators / Denominators

In any given year, the vast majority of America’s tens of millions of gun owners will not have any negative outcomes associated with their hundreds of millions of guns.

Anyone who wants to do the division on all of the above negative outcomes can. For my purposes here, I will just select some of the combined categories at the end for summary purposes.

Total Fatalities****

39,413 / 400,000,000 = 0.000098 fatalities per firearm

39,413 / 76,560,000 = 0.00052 fatalities per gun owner

39,413 / 51,440,000 = 0.00077 fatalities per gun owning household

A mere 0.0098% of guns, 0.052% of gun-owners, and 0.077% of gun owning households are involved in fatalities involving firearms annually.

Looked at the other way around, 99.999% of guns, 99.95% of gun owners, and 99.92% of gun owning households are NOT involved in any fatalities involving firearms annually.

TOTAL FATAL AND NON-FATAL INJURIES

123,626 / 400,000,000 = 0.000309 fatal & non-fatal injuries per firearm

123,626 / 76,560,000 = 0.0016 fatal & non-fatal injuries per gun owner

123,626 / 51,440,000 = 0.0024 fatal & non-fatal injuries per gun owning household

A mere 0.0309% of guns, 0.16% of gun-owners, and 0.24% of gun owning households are involved in fatal or non-fatal injuries involving firearms annually.

Looked at the other way around, 99.97% of guns, 99.84% of gun owners, and 99.76% of gun owning households are NOT involved in any fatal or non-fatal injuries involving firearms annually.

TOTAL FATALITIES AND NON-FATAL INJURIES AND VICTIMIZATION

605,576 / 400,000,000 = 0.0015 fatalities, injuries, & victimization per firearm

605,576 / 76,560,000 = 0.0079 fatalities, injuries, & victimization per gun owner

605,576 / 51,440,000 = 0.012 fatalities, injuries, & victimization per gun owning household

A mere 0.15% of guns, 0.79% of gun-owners, and 1.2% of gun owning households are involved in fatal or non-fatal injuries or victimization involving firearms annually.

Looked at the other way around, 99.85% of guns, 99.21% of gun owners, and 98.82% of gun owning households are NOT involved in fatal or non-fatal injuries or victimization involving firearms annually.

Conclusion

Without trivializing the direct and indirect effects of serious mistakes, negative outcomes, or criminal victimization with firearms, these data underwrite my idea that guns are normal and normal people use guns.

The overwhelming majority of guns, gun owners, and gun owning households are not involved in any of the deviant behaviors involving firearms analyzed above.

The perspective that underwrites my work inverts the typical questions social scientists ask about guns: As plentiful as gun owners and as dangerous as guns are, why are there so FEW negative outcomes with guns in general?

Notes/Caveats

*Although some negative outcomes with guns increased from 2019 to 2021, the change in the numerators are offset in part by the change in the denominators. Additionally, the denominators here are so large that change in the numerators beyond change in the denominators do not substantially change my argument here.

**No one knows what proportion of the U.S. population actually owns guns. As with religion, the federal government does not keep official records or collect statistics on gun ownership. So, we depend on surveys conducted by organizations like Gallup, the Pew Research Center, National Opinion Research Center, and others. These surveys not only produce different estimates, but they also underestimate gun ownership rates. My educated guess is that 33-37% of adults personally own guns and 44-50% of households have guns in them.

***Assault, robbery, or rape was threatened, attempted, or completed in which the offender possessed, showed, or used a firearm.

****This uses the faulty assumption that a different person committed every homicide using a different gun, of course.

Among this article’s general conclusions is that the recent Great Gun Buying Spree “resulted from a general increase in the number of U.S. adults who bought guns, the great majority of whom in any given year already owned firearms. Nonetheless, the number of new gun owners created, 1 January 2019 to 26 April 2021, was sufficiently large (an estimated 7.5 million) and diverse (approximately half were female and almost half were people of color) to have a modest effect on the prevalence of firearm ownership and on the demographic profile of current gun owners.”

Findings regarding new gun owners:

We estimate that nearly 3 million more U.S. adults purchased firearms in 2020 (16.6 million) than in 2019 (13.8 million) (Table 2). As a result, even though the proportion of gun purchasers who were new to gun ownership in each of the 3 calendar years we examined hovered around 20%, without notable differences in this proportion prior to versus during the COVID-19 pandemic, the estimated absolute number of new gun owners increased. In 2019, for example, approximately 2.4 million U.S. adults became new gun owners (0.9% of U.S. adults); in 2020, 3.8 million did (1.5% of U.S. adults). Overall, an estimated 2.9% of U.S. adults (7.5 million people) became new gun owners over the 28 months before the survey, equal to 10% of all U.S. adults who personally owned firearms as of April 2021.

Findings regarding diversity of new gun owners, confirming earlier anecdotal accounts:

We estimate that approximately 10% of gun owners as of May 2021 had become new gun owners over the prior 28 months. Slightly more than half of these new gun owners were male and non-Hispanic White; one fifth were Black and one fifth were Hispanic. One quarter were younger than 30 years. On average, new gun owners owned 1.9 firearms, 1.2 of which were handguns. In the 16 months before the survey, these purchasers bought on average 1.3 firearms, approximately three quarters of which were handguns.

Methodological Notes

I’m not a survey methodologist but I like the opt-in panel design of this study as the response rates seem much better than random digit dialing or mail-back surveys I have seen recently, whose response rates seem to be tanking.

I note the estimated rate of personal and household gun ownership in the 2021 National Firearms Survey is higher than in the General Social Survey, perhaps because it overcomes some of the reasons for underestimation I have noted before.

My only question right now has to do with the estimate of personal gun ownership in this study. The text and Table 1 say 28.8%, but the footnote(*) in Table 1 says 5,932 of 19,049 respondents own firearms. Isn’t that 31.1%? What am I missing here?

I will update this post if/when I get some clarity on this.

This post is not going to analyze the findings in depth (though I will mention some), but is more of a PSA to let everyone know these data are now available are are worth checking out.

Most of the trends seen in earlier versions of this report continued in 2021. 8.3% of American adults have concealed carry permits, over 21.5 million people. That is a 10.5% increase over the number of permits counted in 2020.

The fact that the number of permits continues to grow at such a high rate is particularly notable because an increasing number of states allow permitless carry. Of course, as I note in my book, Concealed Carry Revolution, the dominant model of permitless carry is “Alaska Carry” (h/t reader Matthew Carberry) – the state issues but does not require a permit. But the permit is nonetheless valuable because it (typically) allows more latitude for carrying and also makes inter-state reciprocity possible.

Also notable, from my perspective, is the continuing diversification of concealed carry permit holders. This tracks with the changing face of gun owners that I spoke about recently at the annual conference of the Outdoor Writers Association of America.

Where states make the data available, the report finds the percentage of female and racial minority permit holders continue to grow faster than the percentage of white male permit holders. This is especially true of the percentage of racial minority women permit holders. Of course, beginning with a lower permitting rate facilitates this to some extent, but does not explain it entirely.

Although North Carolina stopped providing demographic data on permit holders in 2016, I did note the inclusion of a graph showing the percentage change in the number of active permit holders by race by year. As an Asian American who first received my concealed carry permit in 2011, I am well-represented in this graph.

There is so much more in this report to learn from. Truly something for everyone, depending on your particular interest. It is an essential document to have on hand.

I was fairly certain that the presentation would not be recorded, so before I left for Jay, Vermont I recorded an abbreviated (15 minute) version of my talk from my basement studio and uploaded it to YouTube.

In the talk I briefly review the concept of Gun Culture 2.0 then discuss its implications for the changing face of gun owners in the United States.

Gun owners are becoming more diverse because Gun Culture 2.0 is more inclusive than Gun Culture 1.0. It is more inclusive because the self-defense at the core of Gun Culture 2.0 is a universal concern. I document this using national data on gun owners and show that the trend that has been developing over a number of years was amplified during the Great Gun Buying Spree of 2020+.

I appreciate your taking a moment to watch the video. If you find this and the other work I do of value, please give the video a thumbs up on YouTube and share it through your own networks.

Several years into my transition to gun owner and scholar, I was a guest on my fellow North Carolinian Sean Sorrentino’s GunBlog VarietyCast (since retired). Sean and I spoke about my background and project, and problems with academics’ dominant approaches to studying guns. When he asked me at the end for my big takeaway, I said something that turned out to be more significant than I expected.

The thing that has surprised me most about getting into gun culture these past 6 or 7 years is that gun owners are people, too. If you just read the scholarly literature on guns, you would not know that.

I have expressed this view in my own scholarly publications on guns, and over the years I have further refined this perspective into a sort of motto:

Guns are normal, and normal people use guns.

I first used this exact phrase during my address at the National Firearms Law Seminar and now sell t-shirts with the phrase to raise funds to support my research on gun culture.

The problem is normality is not newsworthy. It is not of concern to social scientists. It is even hard for me at times to write in an interesting way about something that is unremarkable. And yet it is my dominant experience of guns and gun owners.

The reality that guns are a perfectly normal part of life for a large part of the U.S. population can be seen in a comprehensive survey released by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center in 2017.

To begin with, a majority of the population currently lives with a gun in their house or has in the past, and a sizeable minority – what I call the “gun curious” – have thought about or are actively considering acquiring a gun.

Only about one-third of Americans say they do not and will never own guns, but we have seen during the Great Gun Buying Spree of 2020+ that even those “No-Nevers” can change their minds.

Pew finds a remarkable 7 out of 10 American adults have actually fired a gun at some point in their lives—that is nearly 180 million people. Viewed the other way around: A minority of American adults has never shot a gun.

No one knows what proportion of the U.S. population actually owns guns. As with religion, the federal government does not keep official records or collect statistics on gun ownership. So, we depend on surveys conducted by organizations like Gallup, the Pew Research Center, National Opinion Research Center, and others. These surveys not only produce different estimates, but they also underestimate gun ownership rates. My educated guess is that 40% of adults, more than 90 million civilians, own the 400+ million guns in the US.

On any given day, the vast majority of America’s tens of millions of gun owners will not have any negative outcomes associated with their hundreds of millions of guns. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, in 2018 there were 13,958 homicides using firearms. Even using the faulty assumption that a different person committed every homicide using a different gun, a mere 0.015% of gun-owners and 0.0035% of guns are involved in firearms homicides annually.

Looked at the other way around, at least 99.985% of gun owners and 99.996% of guns are NOT involved in homicide in any given year.

Even if we add suicides (24,432 in 2018), accidental deaths (438 in 2018), and non-fatal firearms injuries (84,776 in 2017), only 0.132% of gun owners and 0.031% of guns at most are “responsible.”

At least 99.87% of gun owners and 99.969% of guns are NOT associated with any of these negative outcomes. (Corrected, H/T Tim)

Without trivializing the direct and indirect effects of serious mistakes and negative outcomes with firearms, the perspective that guns are normal inverts the typical questions social scientists ask about guns: As dangerous as guns are, why are there so FEW negative outcomes with guns in general?

According to Lott’s estimates, there are currently 19.48 million concealed carry permit holders in the United States. This is up from 2.7 million in 1999 and 8 million in 2011. This represents not simply a numeric increase, but a large increase in the proportion of the U.S. adult population with permits, from 1.3% in 1999 to 7.6% in 2020 (p. 6, Figure 1b).

These increases are taking place at the same time that a growing number of states have passed permitless carry laws. For example, the percentage of the population in Oklahoma that has a concealed carry permit has declined since the state passed permitless carry (p. 3).

Other highlights of the 2020 report include:

• Outside of the highly-populous and restrictive states of California and New York, 9.2% of the adult population has a permit (p. 3). Excluding all nine may issue states, the permitting rate is 9.9% in the other 41 states — nearly 1 in 10 (p. 15)
• Alabama (28.5%), Indiana (18.7%), and Iowa (15%) have the highest permitting rates in the country. Hawaii (0.0%), New Jersey (0.02%), and Rhode Island (0.23%) have the lowest (Vermont excluded as has always had permitless carry, pp. 20-22, Table 2).
• In the 14 states that provide data by gender, women are over a quarter (26.4%) of permit holders. In states where comparisons are possible, permitting among women has grown much faster than for men (pp. 4, 30).
• In 4 states that provided data on permitting by race between 2015 and 2020 (Arizona, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas), the permitting rate for Blacks and Asians grew faster than for Whites (p. 30).

Some figures from the report that show these changes follow. There is much more in the report than is covered here. Depending on your particular interests, I am sure you can find something insightful and useful.