By: José Niño
According to a report published by the Washington Examiner, roughly 60% of Americans may be gun owners. AWR Hawkins of Breitbart News noted that this represents an “increase of approximately 25 percent over numbers widely reported heretofore.”
The Washington Examiner report largely used data from Rutgers University’s New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center, which showed that up to 50% of survey respondents who indicated that they weren’t gun owners may indeed be gun owners in real life.
Libertarian magazine Reason alluded to Rutgers doctoral student Allison Bond, who detailed that through the study, researchers found a group of people who have been hesitant to disclose gun ownership in previous surveys.
Bond observed the following: “Some individuals are falsely denying firearm ownership, resulting in research not accurately capturing the experiences of all firearm owners in the U.S.”
The researchers employed the phrase “false denials of firearms ownership” to categorize individuals who perhaps have not disclosed gun ownership from prior pollsters/surveys, noting:
“First, such practices would result in an underestimation of firearms ownership rates and diminish our capacity to test the association between firearm access and various firearm violence-related outcomes. Furthermore, such practices would skew our understanding of the demographics of firearm ownership, such that we would overemphasize the characteristics of those more apt to disclose. Third, the mere existence of a large group of individuals who falsely deny firearm ownership highlights that intervention aimed at promoting firearm safety (e.g., secure firearm storage) may fail to reach communities in need.”
No matter how hard Gun Control Inc. tries to undermine it, the tradition of private gun ownership is not going away anytime soon in the United States.
Americans love their guns, and they are willing to organize effectively to ensure that their right to bear arms is protected from despotic politicians. Even in blue states, there is a significant number of gun owners who aren’t so keen about fully supporting the modern-day Democratic Party’s civilian disarmament agenda.
The George Floyd riots of 2020, where many municipal governments allowed criminals to run loose and indiscriminately tear up private property, demonstrated the limits of government’s ability to protect people and their property. In turn, many lawful individuals took matters into their own hands and became first-time gun owners.
Such developments will continue to take place should the US grow more chaotic at the social and political level. At the end of the day, an armed law-abiding individual is the best guarantor of safety in an increasingly unstable polity.
José Niño is a freelance writer based in Austin, Texas. Contact him via Facebook, Twitter, or email him at [email protected]. Get his e-book, The 10 Myths of Gun Control, here.