The gun-owning American public is all abuzz over the interesting data published in the 2026 National Firearms Survey, conducted by William English, Ph.D., of Georgetown University. English offers the “second wave” survey pursuant to his “first wave” conducted in 2021. While it's no surprise to NRA Women that gun ownership in our demographic continues to surge, you can—and should—read the complete and fascinating analysis of the actual survey, which is replete with a deep dive into demographics, types of firearms, magazines and self-defense use of firearms, and many more details laid out in easy-to-read tables and histogram comparisons to the 2021 findings. An excellent discussion of the “Armed Citizen” data by NRA Editor Frank Miniter is also a must-read.
In the meantime, important at-a-glance findings look like this:
Overall
- 88 million adults—32.7 percent of adults in the U.S.—own a firearm.
- 7 percent of validated gun owners surveyed are female.
- Americans own approximately 461 million firearms:
- 208 million handguns
- 154 million rifles
- 99 million shotguns
- 25.0 percent of gun owners currently own an AR-15 type rifle.
Demographics
- 6 percent do not identify as White (alone).
- 3 percent of validated gun owners are male, 45.7 percent are female.
- 0 percent of Blacks own firearms, a rate within two percentage points of Whites (34.6 percent).
- 3 percent of Hispanics own firearms.
- 0 percent of Asians own firearms.
Self-Defense Use of Firarms
- 6 percent of gun owners, or approximately 33.1 million adult Americans, have used a gun in defense of themselves, their property, a family member, or a member of their household.
- In most cases (76.3 percent), the gun is not fired.
- Gun owners engage in approximately 2.2 million defensive uses of firearms per year.
- The majority of defensive gun uses (74.6 percent) take place outside of the home.
- About half of defensive gun uses (50.8 percent) involve more than one assailant.
- Handguns (74.0 percent) are the firearm most commonly used in defensive incidents, followed by rifles (16.4 percent) and shotguns (9.6 percent).
- In 70.6 percent of defensive incidents, the defense was successful, such that no crime remained to be reported to the police; 8.4 percent of defensive incidents were against animal threats.
- The median age at which reported defensive incidents occurred was 29, and 45.8 percent of reported incidents occurred within approximately the past five years.
- 41.0 percent of male gun owners indicated a defensive use.
- 33.4 percent of female gun owners indicated a defensive use.
From the actual 2026 survey, this table shows key comparisons between 2021 and 2026 data:
