In my Sociology of Guns class today we will be considering the first two of James Wright’s “Ten Essential Observations on Guns in America”: “Half the households in the country own at least one gun” and “There are 200 million guns already in circulation in the United States, given or take a few tens of millions.”
In preparing for the class, I have been trying to summarize and systematize the various surveys that have been conducted on gun ownership in America. This semester I have assigned work based on the National Firearms Surveys of 2019 and 2021 conducted by Deborah Azrael, Matthew Miller, and their team at Harvard/Northeastern Universities and the 2023 National Firearm Attitude and Behaviors Study fielded by publish health scholars at the University of Michigan.
Those who have followed this blog for some time will recall that I have long held that gun owner surveys underestimate the actual level of gun ownership in the U.S. And no survey seems to underestimate gun ownership more than the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey.
In doing my class prep I accidentally came across a paper that adds another piece to the underestimate puzzle. In a paper critiquing William English’s 2021 National Firearms Survey by 5 heavy hitters in the field — Deborah Azrael, Joseph Blocher, Philip Cook, David Hemenway, and Matthew Miller — I came across this table.
Setting aside the 2021 NFS by English, the estimate of personal gun ownership for female respondents in the GSS is well below the other estimates. If that estimate was 6% higher — mirroring the Harvard/Northeastern, Gallup, and Pew estimates — the overall personal gun ownership estimate of the GSS would also be in line with those other surveys.
There are, of course, reasons other than gender that surveys underestimate gun ownership, but this is a helpful piece of the puzzle.
Gun Culture 2.0 
I wish the gun violence academic community would be more critically active in peer-reviewing gun violence publications, which too often seem to slip through the peer review process unscathed. An example is that Kalesan et al paper in The Lancet (2016) which got huge air time in the popular press and was later found to be riddled with errors. Of course the public doesn’t know about the errors, just the uncritical and slavish acceptance of the original paper by the popular press.
Who reads the “oops” stuff? Here, from Ted Alcorn and Scott Burris:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(16)31036-4/fulltext
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I have to give it to Jonathan Haidt again who highlights that peer review works better when you have viewpoint diversity. Otherwise people just can’t see beyond their own assumptions.
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