Parsing the data
If the United States were to disappear tomorrow, the world would lose nearly half of all civilian-owned firearms. With somewhere between 350 to 450 million guns in a country of 340 million people, America doesn’t just lead the world in gun ownership. It exists in a category of its own.
To understand how we got here, we provide some background on America’s gun supply: the basic facts we do and don’t know, the regulatory system that determines what we can know and the cultural divisions that drive both our policies and our debates.
The basics
The terms “American” and “gun” have become entwined, and the numbers explain why. We have way, way more guns than any other country in the world in terms of stock (total number of guns) and per capita rate (number of guns per capita). Switzerland, often cited as rivaling American gun culture, has a civilian ownership rate less than one-quarter of ours. The country with the second-highest gun ownership rate, Yemen, still has fewer than half as many guns per capita as the U.S.
Guns have always been present in the U.S., but the last 25 years have seen manufacturers nearly triple the production of firearms. Since a relatively small proportion — around 5% or less — of guns made in the U.S. are exported each year, that means that the vast majority of these guns are hitting American commercial markets.
This exceptional scale translates into exceptional consequences. American gun violence rates dwarf those of other developed nations, with firearms accounting for nearly 80% of our homicides. Nearly all the difference between American murder rates and peer countries is accounted for by murders committed with guns.
Though it fluctuates considerably decade by decade, the United States’ homicide rate is basically unchanged from 100 years ago, and data going back to the 1940s show that firearm homicides have increasingly grown as a share of overall homicides.
Each year, gun violence costs the United States $557 billion in medical bills, criminal justice costs, recovery care, lost wages from disability or death and quality-of-life costs for pain and suffering of victims and their families. Given that most murders are committed with guns and that murders make up 70% of the cost of crime to society, gun homicides account for more than half of the cost of all crime.
Not to be forgotten, gun violence includes other crimes committed with guns, like nonfatal shootings and robberies. Nor do these numbers account for the additional toll of firearm suicides, which make up more than half of all gun deaths each year.
Yet for all these staggering statistics, there’s a fundamental paradox at the heart of America’s gun story. We know remarkably little about the very thing that makes us unique. Unlike virtually every other consumer product, those who study guns and their consequences in the United States lack reliable data on how many guns exist, who owns them or how they move through markets. These aren’t accidental oversights — they’re deliberate policy choices. A Reagan-era bill made federal gun registries illegal, while the Tiahrt and Dickey Amendments have restricted access to crime gun data and eliminated federal funding for gun violence research, making it difficult to answer basic questions about guns’ impact on society.
What emerges is a portrait of a nation where guns are everywhere yet largely invisible to official tracking. The data we have tell a clear story about American exceptionalism. The data we don’t have tell an equally important story about American politics.
Who regulates what, and how
While other developed countries typically regulate firearms through comprehensive national systems, the U.S. operates through a federal-state framework that creates a complex patchwork of laws varying dramatically across jurisdictions.
The federal government establishes minimum regulations on dealer licensing, interstate sales, the manufacturing and sale of certain types of guns, and eligible buyers. States are able to add stricter requirements above this minimum as long as they remain constitutionally permissible.
Current federal regulations on firearms are few. From the National Firearms Act of 1934 to the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act of 2022, there have been about five or six major (and a few minor) pieces of restrictive federal legislation in all of American history, usually watered-down versions of the originals due to opposition from the gun lobby.
This sparse federal framework means states bear the responsibility for further gun regulation, including efforts to address the secondary market. States handle everything from carrying rules and enhanced penalties for gun crimes to additional ownership requirements that exceed federal minimums. This arrangement creates a complex web of laws that can vary significantly even between neighboring jurisdictions.
The data reveal a clear pattern: States with stronger gun restrictions tend to have lower gun deaths, while states with more permissive regulations see higher rates.
The U.S. regulatory framework contains several significant vulnerabilities that undermine even well-intentioned policies.
Leaks in the faucet
The United States has no registration system of guns, gun sales or gun buyers. This leaves significant barriers to addressing the various “leaks” that allow guns to find their way into the wrong hands.
The secondary market
American gun policy grapples with a fundamental problem: two separate gun markets with vastly different rules.
The first market includes all sales by federally licensed dealers (FFLs), who must conduct background checks and maintain records. The second, the secondary market, covers everything else: private sales at gun shows, online transactions and sales between individuals who aren’t professional dealers. These are legal transactions but have minimal federal regulations. Sellers only need to avoid “knowingly” selling to prohibited buyers without any requirement to verify eligibility.
The vast majority of guns that end up being used in crime come from the secondary market, since these weapons circulate with little oversight. It’s the flow of guns from the licensed to the secondary market that should cause concern. Licensed dealers sometimes illegally sell firearms through straw purchases, fake IDs or corruption. Just 5% of firearm dealers are linked to almost 90% of crime guns recovered by law enforcement.
In New York City, the “time-to-crime” (period between a firearm’s legal sale and recovery in a crime) dropped from 12 years in 2019 to nine years in 2022, suggesting guns are moving into illegal markets faster. Despite this acceleration, New York still has the longest average time-to-crime in the continental United States. This shows that illegal gun markets depend heavily on the legal market structure and geographic proximity to permissive gun laws.
Firearms sold in the secondary market are also a major source of trafficked guns — that is, firearms illegally transported across jurisdictional boundaries, typically from areas with weaker gun laws to areas with stricter regulations. While two-thirds of recent ATF trafficking cases involve new guns, 40% involve firearms acquired secondhand. There’s no telling how many times these firearms have changed hands.
Trafficking across state lines
Regardless of federal laws, firearms are easily transported across state borders. Major cities with strong gun laws — particularly in New York and California — become magnets for trafficked firearms from states with weaker regulations.
New York City had the highest share of trafficked guns originating out of state (86%), followed closely by Newark (86%), with Boston (56%), Washington (53%) and Baltimore (49%) also among the top interstate trafficking cities.
Enhanced lethality
Legal modifications undermine policies meant to keep automatic weapons from civilians. Glock switches and bump stocks turn semiautomatic guns into fully automatic weapons, while high-capacity magazines make it easy to fire dozens of times without reloading. The internet makes these modifications easily accessible. Meanwhile, firearms and ammunition have become magnitudes more lethal over time.
It’s the culture
Perhaps as defining as America’s gun abundance is the nation’s stark cultural divide over them.
Four in ten U.S. households own guns, and about 32% of American adults say they own one personally. But ownership rates only tell part of the story. Gun owners are more likely to say they think guns make us safe and should be more accessible. Gun owners are also more likely to be white, men, Republicans, living in rural areas and from the South. This leaves the United States with major contradicting opinions, even within households, on how to handle guns.
Among those who live with a gun in the house, gun owners are 40% more likely to feel safe with a gun and 120% more likely to enjoy having a gun in the home. In contrast, more than a quarter of people who live with a gun in the house but don’t own the gun say they worry about having a gun in the house.
For a long time, firearms were seen as primarily a sporting or hunting tool. Less than 30 years ago, half of surveyed gun owners said the main reason they owned a gun was for hunting, while only a quarter cited protection. The 1980s and ’90s then saw some of the worst rates of violent crime in recent American history. Fast forward to 2019, when Americans had enjoyed 20 years of homicide rates that were 25% to 50% lower than the ’80s, yet gun owners were still twice as likely to say they owned a gun for protection rather than hunting.
Support for gun control is highest among groups that have lower rates of ownership: women, people of color, young people, city residents, Democrats and those with college and advanced degrees.