On October 21, Pew Research Center released findings that show the annual rate of firearm-related homicides in America declined by nearly 50 percent between 1993 and 2013.
That’s the same time period in which The Washington Post (WaPo) reported that firearm ownership doubled in the United States.
The WaPo did not put a figure on the number of privately owned guns in America. Rather, they estimated that that average gun owner went from owning 4.1 guns in 1994 to owning 8.1 in 2013. Breitbart News used Congressional Research Numbers to show that this means the 192 million guns owned privately in 1994 grew to 310 million or more in 2009 and to an estimated 350 million in 2013.
And PEW Research shows that this surge in privately owned guns did not correlate with an increase in firearm-related homicides but with a plunge in the annual firearm-related homicide rate, which fell from 7 per 1oo,ooo Americans in 1993 to 3.6 per 100,000 in 2013.
Complimenting this 20-year doubling of the number of guns owned by Americans is the fact that concealed carry permit holders nearly tripled between 2007 and now. According to the Crime Prevention Research Center, the “4.6 million” concealed permit holders of 2007 grew to over “12.8 million” permit holders in 2015. That means the last five years of the surge in gun ownership also coincided with a surge in carrying guns in public for self-defense.
Combining these findings and applying them to the times in which we live make clear that in the very year that gun control groups like Moms Demand Action and Gabby Giffords’ Americans for Responsible Solutions were founded to fight gun violence, Americans were embracing the freedom to buy approximately 150 million new guns and to carry many of those guns for self-defense.