Gun sales have grown significantly in recent years, and it follows naturally that the use of arms has as well. According to a recent report, the number of citizens carrying loaded guns on the street nearly doubled between 2015 and 2019, the latest year for which data is available, to 16 million people.
An article published by the American Journal of Public Health, edited by the pro-gun control organization American Public Health Association (APHA), studied the use of guns in the United States.
Twice as many people carry guns on a daily basis
The article is based on a large survey conducted from a highly representative sample of gun users in 2019. It compared results with those obtained in previous years.
When asked about gun use in the previous month, a sample representing 16 million gun owners responded that they had carried guns out on the street at least once in that period. This is a big increase over the 9 million people who reported doing so in 2015. On the other hand, 6 million Americans reported carrying loaded arms on a daily basis. That is double the 3 million of those who did so four years earlier in 2015.
Personal protection cited as the main reason
One of the two main reasons for the increase in gun use is people feeling the increased need to protect themselves. Based on several surveys carried out with the same methodology in previous years, the study shows that in 1994, 46% of the gun owners cited safety-related reasons for their use of firearms. That percentage has been rising: in 2015 it was 65%, and in 2019 it was already 73%. The article also notes:
As personal protection became the predominant motivation for owning firearms, handgun ownership increased disproportionately from 64% in 1994 to 83% in 2021.
Gun sales
The data that is not reflected in the report, but points in the same direction, is that regarding gun sales. According to the data provided by the FBI, the number of guns sold hovered around 8 million units in the first six years of the millennium. By 2010, that number had increased to 10 million purchases, and between 2012 and 2019, between 14 and 16 million guns were sold annually.
Although data for the following two years was not included in the article, it is worth noting that in 2020, gun sales made another dramatic leap to 21.53 million. This trend was consolidated in 2021, when a somewhat lower, but still historically high amount of guns were sold (18.86 million).
Guns against crime
Another study, the largest to date on gun use, showed that there have been about 1.7 million defensive uses of firearms in the United States. This accounts for the number of times that guns were used to prevent crimes of some kind.
This statistic does not exhaust all the crime reduction effects of legal gun ownership, as it does not take into account the times when potential criminals abandoned their plans for fear of defensive gun use (which, therefore, never occurs and cannot be counted).
