Gun Ownership Is Rising Among A New Group, Poll Shows

Gun ownership rose sharply among Republican women over the last five years, while firearm ownership became increasingly aligned with party affiliation, Gallup survey data released Thursday shows.

The new data covers the COVID-19 pandemic years, in which Americans went on a prolonged gun-buying spree. Industry watchers have long suspected that the flurry of gun-buying broadened the demographics of gun ownership in the United States.

Gallup’s polling appears to bear out that impression. Gun ownership is less tied to race, age or gender today than it has been in the past, according to the survey data, which is divided into three six-year periods starting in 2007.

But gun ownership also appears to increasingly show signs of political polarization.

Some 19% of Democrats surveyed from 2019 to 2024 said they owned firearms — two points higher than in the six-year period preceding it and three points lower than in the six-year period from 2007 to 2012.

The number of Republicans who say they own guns, on the other hand, has risen consistently over that time frame, from 38% to 47%.

Republican women are the ones driving up the party’s gun ownership percentage most dramatically, with 19% of them owning guns in the 2007-2012 period and 33% in the most recent six-year period.

Fifteen years ago, party affiliation did not have a significant relationship to gun ownership, according to Gallup Senior Editor Jeff Jones. Other variables were much more clearly associated with gun ownership, like being white, male and from either a rural area or the South — though many of those variables overlapped with Republican Party affiliation.

Now, however, variables like race and gender are not as closely associated with gun ownership as identification with the Republican Party. Likewise, regardless of other demographic variables, Democrats are less likely to own guns than they were 15 years ago.

“What we’re seeing is gun ownership increasingly aligning with your political views, where it wasn’t so much in the past,” Jones told HuffPost.

The survey period overlaps with the Democratic Party’s stronger embrace of gun control measures in response to a string of mass shootings. Republicans, by contrast, have generally resisted gun restrictions aimed at shoring up public safety, while championing a growing movement to carry concealed firearms as a constitutional right rather than by permit.

“It’s become an issue like climate change or abortion,” Jones said. “If you’re in this party, this is what you believe, and there really isn’t much dissension.”

The Gallup polling appeared at odds with survey results released earlier this year from the National Shooting Sports Federation, the industry trade group, which indicated a sharp rise in the number of new shooters, with self-identified Democrats accounting for 31% of them — about 3 million people.

NSSF spokesperson Mark Oliva said he trusted the Gallup data, but wondered why its results had diverged from the trends that his group’s data appeared to indicate.

Oliva noted that the surveys did not contain the same questions and that the NSSF had not surveyed for total gun ownership broken by down by gender and party affiliation combined. He also said that all polling on gun issues may contain some amount of error due to mistrust over disclosing firearm ownership to strangers on the phone.

“Gallup’s polls have been consistent over the years, but some gun owners may be reticent to discuss it on the phone,” Olivia told HuffPost.

Both Gallup and NSSF surveys show overall gun ownership has remained roughly flat, hovering around one-third of Americans.

And both groups’ data also indicate that gun owners are becoming more diverse. Gallup polling did not detect a major shift within any specific racial demographic to account for that, Jones said, noting that the trend likely reflects the fact that America itself has become more diverse over the last two decades.

Oliva, however, noted that the fastest-growing group of gun owners detected by NSSF surveys is Black women.

“Today’s gun owner is more representative of the rest of America because they are the rest of America,” Oliva told HuffPost.