Glenn Reynolds writes:
Here's another in a steady stream of reports along these lines:76 million people own a gun in this country. And now more than ever, the number of women who are buying and learning to fire guns is increasing.
It is indeed one of a steady stream of reports. A steady stream of bogus reports that gun ownership by women is increasing.
Tom Smith and Robert Smith thoroughly debunked this notion in a paper published in The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (86:1 1995). They examined such claims and the evidence and concluded:
Through the circulation of statistics of dubious reliability and accuracy, pro-gun groups have successfully created the impressions that gun ownership by women has increased appreciably and has reached unprecedented levels. Most of the media have accepted the claims of increasing ownershipd and have sometimes even mangled and exaggerated these claims.
The facts of gun ownership by women are dramatically different from that described by pro-gun groups and the media. According to the best available data, the ownership of firearms among women is not increasing, the gender gap is not closing, and the level of ownership is much lower than commonly stated, with about 11 to 12% of women owning a gun and 4.5 to 8% owning a handgun. Nor is the typical female gun owner an unmarried woman living in a large city or a past or fearful victim of violent crime. Gun ownership is higher among married women living outside large cities, and it is associated more with hunting than with either fear of crime or past victimization.
Of course, that was ten years ago. These days, anyone with a web browser can analyse the GSS data themselves using the excellent SDA system.
I plotted the results in the graph above (the output from SDA is here). The error bars show 95% confidence intervals. Smith and Smith's results are still true: the percentage of women owning guns is not increasing. (The trend was a slight decrease, but this was not statistically significant.)
Finally, I should add that I don't think that the pro-gunners promoting the erroneous claims that female gun ownership was increasing were being deliberately deceptive. More likely it was a case of wishful thinking. They wanted to believe those claims were true, so they were willing to accept inadequate evidence for them.
Estimating gun ownership in the United States is a very difficult proposition. The federal government is prohibited by law from maintaining any kind of registry of ordinary firearms (rifles, pistols and shotguns). Very few states have gun registries, and most that do have only pistol registration.
Guns are also not culturally neutral. The mass media and the establishment strongly disapprove of them and many gun owners fear that their guns will one day be outlawed. They are thus less likely to report their ownership of guns to strangers, including those asking them about it in telephone surveys. I, for instance, would refuse to acknowledge any ownership of guns to any person who I did not know personally and trust. I would suspect that all statistics on gun ownership suffer from underreporting.
Anecdotally speaking, over the last ten years, I and many other gun enthusiasts have seen a marked increase in the number of women attending gun ranges and shooting events. This is not wishful thinking, it is an observed fact. I don't think that you can ever come up with a believable statistic that says that X% of women own or do not own guns. Also complicating the picture is the fact that a large percentage of women live in married households, where the man owns guns that the woman has access and can use. In such a case, does the woman own the gun? Or does she have to buy it herself?
Anecdotaly speaking, I must agree that female gun ownership is on the rise. I don't know of many young men (or, males generally) that have become new gun owners. I have taught at least two women about handguns and self defense, and have aided them in the bun buying process because of previous threatened or actual crime victimisation. Also, in the past few years, most of my gun-owning male friends have gotten married and introduced their wives to guns, and now the wives have guns of their own, including self-purchased handguns. Finally, my own wife and now mother and aunt have become gun owners and (sometimes) carriers due to the threat of crime and a perceived need of a tool for self-defense.
So, I can't speak from the statistical data, but from experience I am willing to believe that gun ownership among women is rising, and very fast indeed.