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Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

There is an intriguing trend in the United States where, for the past several decades, the number of gun owners has gone down but the number of guns has gone up.

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That claim is solely based on survey data, and there has been a undeniable trend towards false responses as people become more discreet. It goes hand-in-hand with the move towards home manufacturing.

I would never truthfully answer a survey asking me about firearms.

It's not really intriguing when you consider that non-hispanic whites are the most likely to own firearms, and that that group's size has been essentially stagnant for the past few decades and is currently in decline.

Collectors and others of similar nature aside, I tend to wonder if this is going to lead to problems in the future?

I'm not anti-gun by a long shot (no pun intended), but pictures I have seen of some of these "collections" are staggering (like, enough guns and ammo to arm a small platoon of people).

In many cases they aren't displayed as a collection, but closer to a weapons cache in waiting...for what kind of situation I don't know.

I can clear up the confusion. This is the kind of situation:

https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2019/04/30/violent-uprising...

One of those mysteries in life.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/HX4KKkSKZAY/maxresdefault.jpg

Do you mean the percentage of owners?

I can count on one hand the number of people I know who own a home but don't own a firearm.

What state do you live?

South Carolina.

I did mean the percentage, but it does look like the absolute number of households owning guns has very slightly declined.

I imagine it's difficult to get good numbers on ownership though as the cross section of people who would not disclose firearm ownership to the government or polling agency would also be likely to own a firearm. This is compounded by the fact that firearms last upwards of 100 years with minimal maintenance and there are healthy secondary and black markets for them.

Nope. No guns at this here house. Not since the tragic boating accident of early 2019.

It's definitely region-dependent.

I grew up in an affluent suburb of Massachusetts, where guns were really uncommon.

I got stationed in Yuma, Arizona, where pretty much everyone owned guns.

Here in a suburb of Portland, OR, it's somewhere in the middle. Oregon is an interesting state.

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