Gun violence in the United States
Tens of thousands of firearms-related deaths and injuries occur in the United States each year.
Data are collected yearly by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the US Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics, the FBI, and various state and local agencies. In 2023, the CDC reported 46,728 gun deaths, of which 58% were suicides, 38% were murders, and the remainder were categorized as law enforcement related, accidental, or of undetermined cause.
In 2023, 350 shootings occurred in K-12 schools with an additional 30 on college campuses. This marked the highest number of shootings recorded on school grounds.
According to a Pew Research Center report, gun deaths among America's children rose 50% from 2019 to 2021.
Estimates of defensive gun use in the United States vary widely and are contested. Analyses of the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics' National Crime Victimization Survey—a large, ongoing probability survey that first establishes that a crime occurred—indicate roughly 61,000–65,000 firearm defenses per year across 1987–2021. An online survey of gun owners in 2021 returned a higher figure.
Legislation at the federal, state, and local levels has attempted to address gun violence through methods including restricting firearms purchases by youths and other "at-risk" populations, setting waiting periods for firearm purchases, establishing gun buyback programs, law enforcement and policing strategies, stiff sentencing of gun law violators, education programs for parents and children, and community outreach programs.
Recent polling suggests up to 26% of Americans believe guns are the number one national public health threat.
Gun ownership
The Congressional Research Service in 2009 estimated that among US population of 306 million people, there were 310 million firearms in the U.S., not including military armaments. Of these, 114 million were handguns, 110 million were rifles, and 86 million were shotguns.Accurate figures for civilian gun ownership are difficult to determine. The percentage of Americans and American households who claim to own guns has been in long-term decline, according to the General Social Survey poll. It found that gun ownership by households may have declined from about half, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, down to 32% in 2015. The percentage of individual owners may have declined from 31% in 1985 to 22% in 2014.
Gun ownership figures are generally estimated via polling, by such organizations as the General Social Survey, Harris Interactive, and Gallup. There are significant disparities in the results across polls by different organizations, calling into question their reliability. In Gallup's 1972 survey, 43% reported having a gun in their home. GSS's 1973 survey resulted in 49% reporting a gun in the home. In 1993, Gallup's poll results were 51%. GSS's 1994 poll showed 43%. In 2012, Gallup's survey showed 47% of Americans reporting having a gun in their home, while the GSS in 2012 reports 34%. In 2018 it was estimated that U.S. civilians own 393 million firearms, and that 40% to 42% of the households in the country have at least one gun. However, record gun sales followed in the subsequent years.
In 1997, estimates were about 44 million gun owners in the United States. These owners possessed around 192 million firearms, of which an estimated 65 million were handguns. A National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms, conducted in 1994, estimated that Americans owned 192 million guns: 36% rifles, 34% handguns, 26% shotguns, and 4% other types of long guns. Most firearm owners owned multiple firearms, with the NSPOF survey indicating 25% of adults owned firearms. Throughout the 1970s and much of the 1980s, the estimated rate of gun ownership in the home ranged from 45 to 50%. After highly publicized mass murders, it is consistently observed that there are rapid increases in gun purchases and large crowds at gun vendors and gun shows, due to fears of increased gun control.
Gun ownership rates vary across geographic regions, ranging from 2004 estimates of 25% in the Northeastern United States to 60% in the East South Central States. A 2004 Gallup poll estimated that 49% of men reported gun ownership, compared to 33% of women, while 44% of whites owned a gun, compared to 24% of nonwhites. An estimated 56% of those living in rural areas owned a gun, compared to 40% of suburbanites and 29% of those in urban areas. Approximately 53% of Republicans owned guns, compared to 36% of political independents and 31% of Democrats.
One criticism of the GSS survey and other proxy measures of gun ownership, is that they do not provide adequate macro-level detail to allow conclusions on the relationship between overall firearm ownership and gun violence. Gary Kleck compared various survey and proxy measures and found no correlation between overall firearm ownership and gun violence. Studies by David Hemenway and his colleagues, which used GSS data and the fraction of suicides committed with a gun as a proxy for gun ownership rates, found a strong positive correlation between gun ownership and homicide in the United States. A 2006 study by Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig, also using the percentage of suicides committed with a gun as a proxy, found that gun prevalence correlated with increased homicide rates.
Defensive gun use
The effectiveness and safety of guns used for personal defense is debated. Studies place the instances of guns used in personal defense as low as 65,000 times per year, and as high as 2.5 million times per year. Under President Bill Clinton, the Department of Justice conducted a survey in 1994 that placed the usage rate of guns used in personal defense at 1.5 million times per year, based on an extrapolation from 45 survey respondents reporting using a firearm for self-defense, but noted this was likely to be an overestimate due to the low sample size. A May 2014 Harvard Injury Control Research Center survey of 150 firearms researchers found that only 8% of them agreed that 'In the United States, guns are used in self-defense far more often than they are used in crime'.HICRC random-respondent national surveys were conducted in 1996 and 1999 to investigate the use of guns in self-defense. Survey participants were asked open-ended questions about defensive gun use incidents and detailed questions about both gun victimization and self-defense gun use. Self-reported defensive gun use incidents were then examined by five criminal court judges, who were asked to determine whether these self-defense gun uses were likely to be legal. The surveys found that far more respondents reported having been threatened or intimidated with a gun, than having used a gun to protect themselves, even after having excluded many of these responses; and, a majority of the reported self-defense gun uses were rated by a majority of judges as probably illegal. This was true even when it was assumed that the respondent had a permit to own and carry the gun, and that the event was described honestly. The conclusion being from this report that most self-described 'defensive' gun uses, are gun uses in escalating arguments, and are both socially undesirable and illegal.
Further studies by HICRC found the following: firearms in the home are used more often to intimidate intimates than to thwart crime; gun use in self-defense is rare and not more effective at preventing injury than other protective actions; and a study of hospital gun-shot appearances does not back up the claim of millions of defensive gun use, as virtually all criminals with a gunshot wound go to hospital; with virtually all having been shot whilst the victim of crime and not shot whilst offending.
Between 1987 and 1990, David McDowall et al. found that guns were used in defense during a crime incident 64,615 times annually. This equated to two times out of 1,000 criminal incidents that occurred in this period, including criminal incidents where no guns were involved at all. For violent crimes, assault, robbery, and rape, guns were used 0.8% of the time in self-defense. Of the times that guns were used in self-defense, 71% of the crimes were committed by strangers, with the rest of the incidents evenly divided between offenders that were acquaintances or persons well known to the victim. In 28% of incidents where a gun was used for self-defense, victims fired the gun at the offender. In 20% of the self-defense incidents, the guns were used by police officers. During this same period, 1987 to 1990, there were 11,580 gun homicides per year, and the National Crime Victimization Survey estimated that 2,628,532 nonfatal crimes involving guns occurred.
McDowall's study for the American Journal of Public Health contrasted with a 1995 study by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, which found that 2.45 million crimes were thwarted each year in the U.S. using guns, and in most cases, the potential victim never fired a shot. The results of the Kleck studies have been cited many times in scholarly and popular media. The methodology of the Kleck and Gertz study has been criticized by some researchers but also defended by gun-control advocate Marvin Wolfgang.
Using cross-sectional time-series data for U.S. counties from 1977 to 1992, Lott and Mustard of the Law School at the University of Chicago found that allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons deters violent crimes and appears to produce no increase in accidental deaths. They claimed that if those states which did not have right-to-carry concealed gun provisions had adopted them in 1992, approximately 1,570 murders, 4,177 rapes, and over 60,000 aggravated assaults would have been avoided yearly.
On the other hand, regarding the efficacy of laws allowing use of firearms for self-defense like stand your ground laws, a 2018 RAND Corporation review of existing research concluded that "there is moderate evidence that stand-your-ground laws may increase homicide rates and limited evidence that the laws increase firearm homicides in particular." In 2019, RAND authors published an update, writing "Since publication of RAND's report, at least four additional studies meeting RAND's standards of rigor have reinforced the finding that "stand your ground" laws increase homicides. None of them found that "stand your ground" laws deter violent crime. No rigorous study has yet determined whether "stand your ground" laws promote legitimate acts of self-defense.