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Prof Triggernometry
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2026 National Firearms Survey: Results from the Second Wave, Including Current Ownership of AR-15 Style Rifles, Other "Assault Weapons," and Magazines that Hold More than 10 Rounds
76 Pages Posted: 26 Aug 2026 Last revised: 26 Aug 2026
William English
McDonough School of Business, Georgetown UniversityDate Written: August 24, 2026
Abstract
This report summarizes the findings of the second wave of the National Firearms Survey, a national survey of firearms ownership and use conducted in July and August of 2026. The survey was administered online to a representative sample of 51,398 U.S. residents aged 18 and over, and it identified 16,688 internally validated gun owners who answered in-depth questions concerning their ownership and use of firearms, including questions about using a firearm in self-defense. The second wave incorporates a series of methodological refinements that respond directly to scholarly discussion of the first (2021) wave: ownership questions specify individual rather than household or spousal ownership; questions about magazines and “assault weapons” ask about current rather than past ownership; AR-15 type rifles and other similarly styled semi-automatic rifles are asked about separately; respondents who report defensive gun uses are asked the approximate age at which each incident occurred and whether the defensive use succeeded in averting a crime (or was directed against an animal threat); and, as a two-stage data-integrity check, respondents are counted as gun owners only if they both indicated firearm ownership on a screening question and subsequently reported owning a positive number of rifles, shotguns, or handguns in a detailed count of firearm types that required a response. In addition, the analyzed sample reflects standard quality-control checks, including an embedded attention check and the removal of responses with low reCAPTCHA scores and suspected duplicate responses.
With raked weighting on gender, age, race, and state of residence, using targets from the 2024 American Community Survey, the survey finds that 32.7% of U.S. adults (95% CI 32.2% – 33.2%) personally own firearms, suggesting that approximately 88 million American adults own guns. Following the practice of major survey programs such as the General Social Survey, Gallup, and Pew’s American Trends Panel, household income is not employed as a weighting dimension. However, income-raked estimates, which range up to 34.9%, are reported as robustness exercises in an appendix. Ownership is demographically diverse: 45.7% of validated gun owners are female, 25.6% do not identify as White (alone), and the gap in ownership rates between White Americans (34.6%) and Black Americans (33.0%) has narrowed to less than two percentage points. The survey finds that 37.6% of gun owners have used a firearm to defend themselves, their property, a family member, or a member of their household, and it estimates that guns are used defensively by firearms owners in approximately 2.2 million incidents per year. In most defensive incidents no shot was fired (76.3%), about half (50.8%) involved more than one assailant, and in 70.6% of incidents respondents report that the defensive use was successful, such that no crime remained to be reported to the police. 8.4% of defensive incidents were directed against animal threats rather than criminal threats. Separate from these self-defense incidents, 34.7% of gun owners reported that the mere presence of a gun has deterred criminal conduct.
A majority of gun owners (70.0%) indicate that there are some circumstances in which they carry a handgun for self-defense. We estimate that approximately 33.6 million gun owners (39.3% of those aged 21 and over) are “public carriers” who are permitted to carry and carry at least sometimes. The average gun owner owns about 5.2 firearms, and handguns are the most common type of firearm owned (91.6% of owners). 50.5% of gun owners – approximately 44.5 million adults – report that they currently own magazines that hold more than 10 rounds (approximately 539 million such magazines in total), and 88.0% of these owners cite a defensive purpose for owning them. 25.0% of gun owners currently own an AR-15 type rifle, 12.9% currently own other similarly styled semi-automatic rifles, and 30.0% – approximately 26.4 million adults – currently own at least one firearm in one of these two categories, with approximately 40 million AR-15 type rifles and 20 million other similarly styled rifles owned in total. Overall, Americans own approximately 461 million firearms, consisting of approximately 208 million handguns, 154 million rifles, and 99 million shotguns.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7347338
Be ready to observe impending catastrophe awaiting the progressive crusaders of the gun-grabbing Left, whose grand, pious dreams of a disarmed peasantry are about to collide head-on with a most inconvenient reality. One glance at the 2026 National Firearms Survey reveals a truth so staggering that even the most zealous advocate of the corporate state must cover their eyes: the modern semi-automatic rifle and its standard-capacity magazine are no longer rare novelties, but the quintessential tools of the contemporary populace.
Now, with monumental Second Amendment challenges consolidated on the docket of the SCOTUS, the judiciary is poised to invoke the devastating "common use" standard. This legal doctrine, which dictates that the state cannot ban weapons widely possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes, is about to act as a lead weight, dragging all the carefully crafted legislative bans into a swift and permanent watery grave. It is a comedy of errors for the utopian reformers, who spent years constructing intricate bureaucratic traps, only to watch their entire apparatus get crushed by the sheer, unyielding volume of ordinary citizens quietly exercising their ancient, historical prerogatives. The 60-years of insult to our Second Amendment rights are about to be removed.
