Percent of Firearms Ownership by State

[mbass]

I think the reason the numbers aren't adding up is the pole is dated 2001; long before the "rush to arms" in response to this administration.

[BamaBoy]

It would be interesting to see a parallel chart so we could compare each state's homicide rate, especially with firearms. The gun ownership rate in New Jersey, for example, is above only the rates in DC and Hawaii, and yet Camden and Newark are among the most dangerous cities in the country. Trenton, which is so small it has only one high school, routinely experiences drive-by shootings.

When I lived in New Jersey, I was usually in a semi-rural area where much of the relatively scant population owned guns. Crimes with firearms were very rare in those areas. In Trenton, where the rate of legal ownership was probably 2% but the rate of illegal ownership 50%, gun violence was so common it sometimes didn't even make the news.

As everybody knows, the District of Columbia—at the bottom of the list—also has horrendous crime that includes hundreds of murders annually, mainly with firearms. Too bad we don't have statistics on illegal guns. We might see New Jersey and DC at the top of the chart.

Comment about Pennsylvania: once you get out of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, much of the population owns guns. Probably at something like the rate in Wyoming, which doesn't have big cities full of people who don't own (legal) guns and technically bring the overall percentage down.

[gdcleanfun]

Bare in mind (or should that read: bear in mind, ha ha) that these statistics are one and one-half years old. I'm thinking that the percentages in D.C. may have changed dramatically w/in the past few months.

[LiveBlues]

Also, keep in mind that it is a percentage of the state population. Idaho, in a three way tie for 6th has a state population of around 1.5 million. It's easier to have a much higher percentage given the low population and gun friendly laws.

[TnRebel]

I think that is an old chart , I'm sure Florida is higher now .

[BamaBoy]

Here's a link that shows gun ownership and homicide rate together for each state. Some statistics might seem surprising, but keep in mind that demographics vary greatly within states. The figures for a given state are merely the averages of the figures for a variety of subpopulations that generally live in different geographic areas. Therefore, states with highly disparate populations produce strange numbers. For example, Florida's ownership rate is low because few of the millions of retirees who relocated from the cities of the northeast own guns. Further, states like Idaho and Wyoming, where gun ownership is high, do not contain the urban ghettos of New Jersey, New York, and Maryland, where gun ownership is low, but the social pathology is devastating, and illegal guns abound. Homicide rates in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia and grossly inflated by the sky-high rates in a few specific areas.

More interesting would be a state-by-state sociodemographic breakdown by (1) rate of legal gun ownership, (2) rate of illegal gun ownership (tough to nail down, I admit), (3) homicide rate, (4) race/ethnicity, (5) age, (6) sex, and so on. The percentage of murders with illegally versus legally owned guns would also be interesting. I'll bet it would be at least 50 illegal to every 1 legal. The U.S. Department of Justice probably publishes those statistics somewhere.

Campaign For Liberty — Gun Crime - A State by State Statistical Approach

[Bongo Boy]

Since I think the requirement for registration of ifrearms isn't uniform across states, I gotta think the data is at best misleading. How could anyone determine the ownershop of firearms? Anywhere? MA or UT? I dunno. I know that, for myself personally, 2/3 of the stuff I have NO body knows about...and it was all purchased legally. There is no way in hell anyone knows what people actually own, anywhere. It's all garbage data, IMO. While it may represent accurate, facutal data with regard to some sort of legally registered or otherwise recorded ownershiip, that has little to do with actual ownership...just based on everyone in the world I know and 50 years of personal experience.

Anyone intent on bringing harm to the homeland should understand this. :)

[HootmonSccy]

Originally Posted by IWLAFART

West Virginia is 55.4 % and we have two senators who are anti-gun.
If I knew how to send that link to Senators Byrd and Rockafeller I would.

Go to the Senate website look up your senator - go to contacts - and send them an e-mail with the link..

[BamaBoy]

If these data were gathered through government records, the figures would have to be weighted to account for guns the government didn't know about, from old hand-me-down shotguns to smuggled fully autos. Even in New Jersey, where I had purchased 8 handguns over the years (and had to obtain a separate permit to purchase each one), my local police department had records for only 2 of them, and I had (through a dealer) legally sold one of those to a friend in Pennsylvania. So available information would be inaccurate even from New Jersey, a state that is obsessive about gun paperwork.

Usually information of this kind is collected through surveys. Of course, if the survey is to be truly scientific, it has to be conducted carefully, and demographers, statisticians, and other experts have to weight the results intelligently. But it's hard enough to get accurate information on what people eat and drink, or how they manage their household budgets, and researchers have studied those areas for many years. Trying to get a true picture of gun ownership would, I think, be extremely difficult.

And trying to measure the ownership of illegal firearms (from unregistered and thus technically illegal guns in Illinois to sawed-off shotguns regularly used in Bronx robberies to the mountain of illegal guns in the possession of organized crime) would be like trying to gauge the underground (cash) economy: it's vast, and nobody really knows its extent.

[surfcc]

An armed society is a polite society....and folks aint so polite in DC.