GunsJust how many guns do Americans own? (And why do estimates vary so widely?)

By Alex Yablon

Published 22 June 2018

There is no official count of how many guns Americans own. But the best available calculations make it clear that the number has grown by tens of millions in recent decades, leaving the United States ever more densely armed than other countries. A June 2018 report from the Small Arms Survey estimates that American civilians own 393 million guns, both legally and otherwise, out of a worldwide total of 857 million firearms. That’s up from 270 million civilian-owned guns domestically, and 650 million globally, in 2007.

There is no official count of how many guns Americans own. But the best available calculations make it clear that the number has grown by tens of millions in recent decades, leaving the United States ever more densely armed than other countries.

A June 2018 report from the Small Arms Survey estimates that American civilians own 393 million guns, both legally and otherwise, out of a worldwide total of 857 million firearms. That’s up from 270 million civilian-owned guns domestically, and 650 million globally, in 2007, the last time the Swiss organization released an estimate.

The report shows that not only has the total number of guns owned by private citizens in the United States gone up, but so has the country’s share of the global total: from 42 percent a decade ago to 46 percent today.

“The biggest component driving up the number of guns in the world is American civilian buying,” said Aaron Karp, the report’s author.

Both domestically and globally, guns kill more people than any other kind of weapon. But because they are smaller, cheaper, more widely produced and less regulated than other weapons, they are inherently difficult to track. In the United States, a hard count of the civilian arsenal is impossible: A federal law fought for by the National Rifle Association prohibits a central registry of firearms possessed by private owners. (The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which regulates gun sales, even faces severe restrictions on how much it can digitize its records of firearms transactions, lest they form a de facto national gun inventory.)

As a result, experts have to make estimates of privately owned guns using wildly different data and methodology, and they can reach widely varying conclusions.

The Small Arms Survey count is significantly higher than one produced by the National Firearms Survey, a joint project of Harvard and Northeastern University, which in 2015 estimated that American civilians owned 265 million guns. Its authors calculated that the nation’s firearms stockpile had increased by only 70 million guns