Who owns guns in America? White men, mostly
 

Part of the problem with the gun debate in America is that gun owners and people who aren't comfortable with gun ownership are, to a certain extent, just different kinds of people.

This isn't a lament about how there isn't real debate in America anymore. It's a simple fact. Gun owners are more likely to be white, male, and rural. People who don't own guns ? and even more so, people who are uncomfortable with them ? are more likely to be nonwhite, female, and urban or suburban.

A Pew Research Center report from 2013 compiled in-depth statistics on people who said they owned guns or had guns in the household. It found that white males make up the bulk of America's gun owners.

The chart below shows one way to look at this discrepancy: 31 percent of whites own guns, and white men make up a much larger share of that than white women. Another way to look at it is to think about how the population of all Americans compares to the population of Americans who own guns: Only 32 percent of Americans are white men. But white males make up 61 percent of gun owners.

That divide became even more pronounced when Pew asked people who didn't own guns whether they'd be comfortable with a gun in the house. It turns out that people who don't own guns but who are demographically similar to gun owners are more comfortable with guns than those who aren't (women and nonwhites).

When the debate comes to gun control, though, the real divide isn't gun ownership; it's partisanship

As you might expect, gun owners are a lot more likely than non-owners to say that gun control would have negative effects ? and a lot less likely to say it would have upsides. Only 32 percent of gun owners agree that stricter gun laws would help reduce accidental firearm deaths; 65 percent of people without household guns do. On the other hand, 68 percent of gun owners believe stricter gun control would give government too much power ? compared with 49 percent of gunless households.

But that divide might simply reflect the fact that gun owners are more likely to be Republicans and gunless households are more likely to be Democrats. And the partisan divide is the real difference in the gun debate.

The Pew study didn't divide up exactly how many Republicans or Democrats are gun owners. But it did reveal that gun owners are slightly more likely to be Republicans than the average American (28 percent of gun owners are Republicans, compared with 22 percent of all voters) and that people without guns in the house are slightly more likely to be Democrats (32 percent of all Americans are Democrats, but 39 percent of people who live in gunless households are).

When it comes to asking about the effects of gun control, though, the differences between Democrats and Republicans are much bigger. Just 32 percent of Republicans believe that stricter gun control will help prevent accidental gun deaths, on par with the number of gun owners who believe that. Meanwhile, 74 percent of Democrats do ? a higher level of support than among gunless households. And on the flip side, 76 percent of Republicans believe that stricter gun laws would give the government too much power, while only 38 percent of Democrats agree.

Who owns guns in America? White men, mostly. - Vox

You're talking legally right? Most white gun owners are legal gun owners.

Now black gun owners...that's a different story. :1orglaugh

Lets say roughly 80% are white and 20% non white. Even if all non whites did not own guns for that statement to be correct 75% of whites must own a gun...

And nice to see yet another white/non white mongering thread from you!

Totally agree, there are many us ppl who have guns illegally. No matter black or white they are killing ppl for racism or religion

Just gunning by ...

I couldn't have said it better myself. :2 cents:

Can't say I'd argue with any of that.

His ghetto educated black ass won't ever get it. :1orglaugh

Hard to get completely concrete data, but here is some interesting info: MSNBC's Joe Scarborough: Tiny fraction of crimes committed with legal guns | PunditFact

Are guns a problem? Maybe, maybe not, I don't know, that's a whole field of arguments that nobody is ever going to agree on. Are criminals a problem? Yes. That is something we all agree on. That is something we should be acknowledging and tackling instead of arguing about whether or not the ~97% legal gun owners are going to do something stupid.

Yet another game of political back and forth instead of addressing the common denominator and fixing it. Stop looking for outliers, focus on the common ground.

In the article above you will notice a high percentage of people committing crimes with "borrowed" guns. I don't know what the laws are, but as far as I'm concerned, if you facilitate a friend with a gun and they commit a crime, you should be held accountable as well. It's no different than being in the vehicle when your buddy steals a car. It's not difficult to secure a gun. Don't let others use it.

to legal gun owners add mass shootings + murder suicide

news: who commits more gun crimes in America? black men, mostly.

if more blacks held the money guess what... :2 cents::2 cents: money is the main target!

There is no way to count all the guns. Usually crime can be directly tied to the size of the illegal gun population.

Does racism justify crime or does crime justify racism?

Crime is crime and firearm related crime is firearm related crime.

People get murdered because someone wants their possessions or hates on them.

Preachers of Gods tell people to murder in their Gods' name too -- race has no bearing on the issue :2 cents:

The whole argument is a red herring.

Harrison's Postulate: For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.

The gun laws as they stand right now are the strictest they've ever been in the United States. With gun control laws are as strict as they've ever been, we've had more mass shooting than the history of the U.S.? If you can't look at that fact alone and understand that there are underlying issues, then I don't know what else to say other than you're completely brainwashed by the liberal propaganda machine. I laugh when someone calls me anything that comes directly from liberal talking points, because that's exactly when I know they're nothing more than brainwashed sheep that don't warrant my time, or effort. They're lost to the machine forever. C'est la vie.

Mass shootings are not on the rise, they are as frequent as they have ever been while the population has grown, so in effect they have dropped somewhat.

Gun violence is at record lows in the US, while gun ownership is at record highs.

Why? Who knows, but one thing for sure is that criminals are generally cowards and do not like being shot at. Whether that is a factor or not is unclear to me, but there does seem to be a tendency for mass shootings to occur in gun free zones, there don't ever seem to be any armed civilians in the list of victims, which to me makes it seem that these assholes are not looking for a fight, they are looking for headlines.

They white men also own most of the property. Clearly they need a gun or two to defend themselves and what's theirs against all the savages who just try to steal it from them.

This video pretty much sums up my opinion on gun ownership.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0yKwAD7O-s




:thumbsup

BOMB!! BINGO!!!

Mostly the people that flash their money..:2 cents:

I didn't know that. Learned something new today. :thumbsup

I agree 100%. Social media has given them the ability to get their 15 minutes, and the story wouldn't be as newsworthy if the headline read, "Mass shooting stopped by armed citizen".

Gun 'Debate' minions are socially engineered Homo Sapiens that are brainwashed into taking the debate focus away from Rockefeller psychotropic 'medicine' and shift blame to the tools that protect us from those rotting Rockefeller maggots :2 cents:

And that Rockefeller Christmas Tree Has An Enormous Carbon Footprint.

seem pretty common versus dindos agreed :thumbsup

Mass shootings have tripled in the last 3 years.

i'll have to dig up some of the articles i've been reading because it's a dilemma i've been trying to sort out. otoh, gun crime overall is down and trending down. at the same time spree shootings have been trending up and then tripling over the last 3 years. but the problem with that is what is the definition of a mass/spree shooting? i go with the 3+ dead/4+ shot definition.

lol @ racial thread by BM again... come on, tell everyone it's still a coincidence its always somehow about race :1orglaugh

When are you counting from, and what are you calling a mass shooting?

I am talking about incidents where 4 or more people were murdered, not in the course of another crime being committed and not in a conflict over sovereignty. - basically people just shot for the hell of it.

In that regard, there are 7 European countries leading the US in both body count and frequency of attacks since 2009. These include:

Norway, Macedonia, Serbia, Slovakia, Finland, Belgium and the Czech Republic.

And from 1993 to 2013 gun related homicides in the US fell from 7 deaths per 100,000 people to 3.6. Not sure what the date for 2014 and 2015 show, but special interest groups like bloomberg and mother jones like to include suicides and other non violent crime statistics to prop up their agenda.

Everything I read says gun ownership is down. This would be a key point to figure out. We all agree that crime and violence are down. Is a contributing factor lack of guns or guns in the right hands?

Pretty interesting article - How gun control works in America, compared with 4 other rich countries - Vox

I think it's unlikely that gun ownership is down, what may be down is the amount of people willing to admit they have a gun with as much talk about gun control as is going around.

Interesting though, I was not aware gun ownership was deemed "down" since sales are very high and, enough so that the price of an AR doubled for a bit, and a lot of popular ammo like 22lr and 9mm was very difficult to find for a while.

But I must admit that is very likely to be because of gun owners stocking up in case guns and ammo become harder to get, which I think is inevitable. I don't think it's good or right but it does seem to be the aim of the powers that be to disarm the law abiding public and right and good have never been an obstacle for them.

No idea why. It seems to be a common theme if you google it - TYWKIWDBI ("Tai-Wiki-Widbee"): American household gun ownership is declining

http://www.norc.org/PDFs/GSS%20Repor..._1972-2014.pdf

like usual you add nothing to the conversation :Oh crap

You keep pushing this threads

Actually there is a great divide between rural America and Urban America. Anyone that has lived in a major US city knows that most people do no carry guns there. It just wouldn't work out well and generally civilized people understand this.

Now on the other hand in big cities and crime ridden areas, criminals will have illegally or potentially even legally acquired guns.. This is why people in urban settings are usually against guns. Guns cause a lot of complexity in a urban environment and these people shouldn't have to carry guns to protect themselves in a civilized society.

For fucks sake even towns in the Wild West banned guns in their towns because of all the deaths when drunken assholes met other drunken assholes. It wasn't just because of a few billy the kid gun slingers, but random everyday assholes shooting each other because they had guns on their sides and very little law. This is why many sheriffs were as bad as the gun slingers.. Due to this many towns would ban guns and collect them by force from anyone that entered the town. This is American history that the NRA nutters love it to ignore and forget about..

Then you have rural America, which has a completely different experance with guns. These people are dealing with much smaller groups of people and they usually know one another. They know when someone is there out of place or not a local. It's a completely different environment but the same gun rules are used for both types of places...

If every asshole in New York was armed with a gun, then it would be like watching dumb Russian dash cam videos of idiots pulling guns on each other as a daily routine...

i think you are ignoring race. I see a large correlation with racism and gun ownership.

Do you racialize you are racializing every racial story while non racializing people are racializing because of the racial headline?

Interesting stats. I did notice something very interesting, to me at least, it seems that over the time period those stats covered, the number of people refusing to answer the question tripled, as did the number of people claiming their personal guns were "missing".

A few (3 or 4) years ago I lived in Illinois and had to get a FOID card to own a gun, I was told at the time the permits were taking months to issue because Illinois was swamped with applications. There were similar reports from around the country that application processing was backed up.

I notice that increasingly, the media is trying to make us think everyone is on board for stuff so we feel like we should be too.

"everyone supports this, everyone supports that" Where are these people that are supporting this and that? I can't seem to find them but the phone operator doing the survey did, so I guess they are out there, at least they claim to be.

I don't have a lot of faith in polls, I used to run phone campaigns for a living and it seems like increasingly, it's a special kind of person who will participate in a phone survey, most likely not a solid representation of the majority. I can't tell how this poll was conducted or what the total number of respondents were from the .pdf but I think the trebling of respondents refusing to say whether they had a gun and the trebling of respondents claiming their guns were missing is at least as interesting as the decline. I mean if 3% of your respondents flat out refuse to answer, how many others are straight lying?

Also as far as the white to black aspect of gun ownership, we hear a lot about disproportionate prosecution and incarceration of black males, which generally makes it illegal for them to own guns, either temporarily or permanently. This would obviously directly impact the % of black men who own a gun and will admit it to a stranger.

So not saying those polls are wrong, but they may be telling us more than they intend to.

The guns pop-up like mushroom is Us :pimp

Students... both..

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I was also thinking only the dumbest criminal uses his own gun to commit a crime. So those guns are almost always bought illegally or stolen. So this would make the most sense to focus on if you wanted to reduce violent crimes that use a gun. Even the NRA could get behind that.

I know tons of people with guns. I don't think I know more then a couple of people who do it legally.

How they define a mass shooting has changed...