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Comment by balloot | Hacker News Reader

In a totally and completely unrelated fact, the rate of gun ownership is also down 30% since the 1980's. It's almost as if the two may have a relationship, but that certainly cannot be the case because the NRA has spent a jillion dollars telling me otherwise!

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All of those statistics that I've seen, claiming that rates of ownership are down, are based on surveys.

What do you think are common reactions from gun owners when a nosy stranger calls them on the phone and asks if they own a gun?

Might it have correlations with the Zeitgeist created by the gun grabbers, especially when they dance on the blood of victims like with Newtown?

I haven't run the numbers myself, but someone's claimed that if you mash these all together, the post-Newtown "admits to owning a firearm" + the number known to be outstanding (we have solid figures on legal production and imports) and the population, the average gun owner owns about $100K worth of firearms.

See also solid evidence like Illinois FOID application rates as I mentioned elsewhere in this topic. By definition those are from people who haven't previously legally owned guns, and they've quadrupled since Newtown.

^ this. No one I know who is a gun owner would say "yes" if called as part of a survey and asked if they own guns.

> It's almost as if the two may have a relationship

Negative correlation would be my guess[1]. Where do I get my NRA check for telling you that?

[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=10129

Less people may own guns, but the people who own them own more per person than they used to.

That said, most guns used in homicides aren't used by the/a registered owner.

That's interesting, because someone else pointed out a large increase in the total number of guns. Can you provide a link for that figure?

So there are more guns in circulation, but distributed amongst fewer people? This doesn't surprise me.

The article seems to disagree with you:

>The number of firearms available for sale to or possessed by U.S. civilians (about 310 million in 2009, according to the Congressional Research Service) has grown in recent years, and the 2009 per capita rate of one person per gun had roughly doubled since 1968. It is not clear, though, how many U.S. households own guns or whether that share has changed over time.

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