A portrait in numbers of what we know and where the gaps are
Women wield and are victimized by firearms in ways distinct from men. Here's what we know.
When women buy guns
Somewhere between 350 and 450 million guns are in civilian hands in the United States, more than one for every American and close to half of all the civilian-owned firearms on earth. American manufacturers have more than doubled annual production since the turn of the century, and because only about 4% of what they make is exported, nearly all of those guns have stayed here. About a third of American adults own a gun, and roughly 4 in 10 live in a household with one.
A growing share of those owners are women, though how large a share is a difficult question to answer. There is no national registry of firearms or their owners, and that is a policy choice rather than an oversight: a Reagan-era bill made federal gun registries illegal, and the Tiahrt and Dickey amendments to that law went on to restrict access to crime-gun data and eliminate federal funding for gun violence research. Everything anyone knows about who owns a gun in America therefore comes from asking people directly, and their willingness to answer such questions varies. Our best estimates come from three national surveys. They put the share of women who personally own a firearm somewhere between 1 in 7 and 1 in 4.
Even though the estimates vary, the trends are all in the same direction. The recent growth in firearm ownership has been driven in large part by women. Of the 11.2 million Americans who bought their first gun between 2021 and 2024, nearly half were women.
Ask women why they own a firearm, and overwhelmingly the answer is protection. Both men and women rate protection in the home highly: 89% of women rate protection at home as at least somewhat important, compared with 91% of men. Where they differ is in other motivations. Men are more likely to cite hunting and target shooting, while women are more likely to own a gun for protection alone. In a 2017 Pew survey, 27% of women gun owners said protection was their only reason for owning a firearm, compared with just 8% of men.
The growth has also not been evenly spread. Gallup’s data show that almost the entire increase in women’s gun ownership over the past 15 years comes from Republican women, whose ownership rate rose by more than 10 points while Democratic and independent women barely moved.
Protection may be the reason many women own firearms, but increased ownership has not led to lower rates of firearm violence against women.
How women are harmed by guns
Women are not only gun owners or gun purchasers. They are harmed by guns in ways that are often different from how men are harmed.
First, a caveat about the evidence. CDC mortality data lag by roughly 18 months, which makes 2024 the most recent complete year. The system that carries the details about where women are killed and their relationship to the person who killed them covers only the states and cities that fund it, so its totals run below the national counts.
But here’s what we do know: About 6,200 women and girls now die by gunfire in the United States every year, about 50% more than in the early 2000s. Accounting for population growth, the death rate has increased by about 30%. The count peaked at 6,821 in 2021 and has eased since.
But the largest firearm threat to women is not homicide. More than half of firearm deaths among women are suicides, and firearm suicide has risen considerably faster than firearm homicide over the past quarter century. Accounting for population increase, the firearm suicide rate has increased 39% since 1999, compared with 15% for homicide, and in 2024, 3,551 women and girls died by firearm suicide compared with 2,626 who were killed in firearm homicides. The United States also stands apart from other wealthy countries: of all women killed with firearms across the high-income nations studied, 92% were killed in the United States.
Two trends have been unfolding at the same time. The number of women dying by suicide rose steeply through 2018 before declining slightly, while the share of those suicides involving a firearm followed a different path. Firearms accounted for 29.6% of suicide deaths among women and girls in 2007, rising to 36.1% in 2024, the highest share since 2000. Most of that increase has occurred since 2019.
Even so, women are far less likely than men to use a gun when attempting suicide.
That distinction helps explain why suicide attempt rates and suicide death rates look so different. Girls in high school report attempting suicide at roughly twice the rate of boys, 12.6% compared with 6.4%, while among adults the reported rates are nearly even. Yet men die by suicide about four times as often as women. A major reason is method. A suicide attempt with a firearm is fatal about 90% of the time, while poisoning is rarely fatal. A concern is that women seem to be switching from less lethal methods to firearms, raising the lethality of their suicide attempts.
Women killed by someone else are much more likely than men to be killed at home. Nearly two-thirds of women shot to death are killed in a house or apartment, compared with under two-fifths of men. Men are more likely to be killed in streets, vehicles and commercial areas.
When women are victims of gun crimes, the perpetrator is typically someone they know well. Where the relationship to the killer is known, 61% of women were killed by a current or former intimate partner, compared with just 6% of men. For male victims, the perpetrator of a gun crime is more often an acquaintance or stranger.
This is also the one category of firearm homicide in which women have a higher death rate than men. Women are shot to death by an intimate partner at a rate of 0.60 per 100,000, compared with 0.15 for men — four times the rate, even though men’s overall firearm homicide rate is about five times higher.
The burden is not evenly distributed. Black women are killed with firearms at roughly six times the rate of white women. That gap is smaller than the equivalent gap among men, where Black men are killed at about 17 times the white male rate, and yet the rate of homicide by firearm for a Black woman is more than twice that for a white man.
The risk also increases with pregnancy. Pregnant women and women in the first year after pregnancy had a 37% higher firearm homicide rate than other women of reproductive age (their homicide rate across all methods was 26% higher).
That risk also rises with firearm ownership at the state level: each percentage-point increase in household firearm ownership is associated with an 8% increase in firearm homicide among pregnant women.
Just like overall firearm deaths, female firearm death rates vary dramatically by state, from 0.8 per 100,000 in New York to 7.8 in Mississippi and New Mexico. The lowest rates tend to cluster in states with stricter permitting laws.
New York City offers a local example of how progress against gun violence can differ for women and men. Although shootings have fallen to historic lows, shootings of women have declined much less. Women accounted for 12.4% of shooting victims in 2025, their highest share in at least 20 years.
The interaction between carrying and being victimized
For women who respond to real or perceived risk by carrying a gun for protection, there is another question: What happens if they actually use it? Stand Your Ground laws are meant to strengthen self-defense claims by removing the duty to retreat before using force against an imminent threat.
Florida’s Stand Your Ground law can shield people who use legally justified force from criminal prosecution, even when they could have retreated. But that protection may not operate equally for women. In an analysis of 237 Stand Your Ground cases in Florida between 2005 and 2013, Justin Murphy found a large gender gap in domestic cases even after accounting for other case characteristics. The estimated probability of conviction was 40% for a male defendant, compared with 80% for a woman in an otherwise similar case.
Taken together, these findings form a pattern that is hard to ignore. Women are disproportionately shot and killed at home and by intimate partners, and the evidence from Stand Your Ground cases suggests that women may face greater legal consequences when violence occurs in those same domestic settings.
American women may be far less likely to be armed than American men, but they are increasingly becoming gun owners — and gun victims. If we fail to understand the distinct particulars of why women wield firearms and how they are harmed by them, we will never effectively reduce that harm.
