Most comprehensive study in over 20 years finds that the number of guns has gone up yet the percentage of gun owners has gone down.

Courtesy of the Guardian:  

Americans own an estimated 265m guns, more than one gun for every American adult, according to the most definitive portrait of US gun ownership in two decades. But the new survey estimates that 133m of these guns are concentrated in the hands of just 3% of American adults – a group of super-owners who have amassed an average of 17 guns each. 

The unpublished Harvard/Northeastern survey result summary, obtained exclusively by the Guardian and the Trace, estimates that America’s gun stock has increased by 70m guns since 1994. At the same time, the percentage of Americans who own guns decreased slightly from 25% to 22%.

The survey also found that more women are buying guns while the percentage of male gun buyers was decreasing slightly.  The women were more likely to own a gun for self defense, and not to feed their ego, and typically only owned one firearm.

However this desire for protection is fed by fear and misinformation:

“The desire to own a gun for protection – there’s a disconnect between that and the decreasing rates of lethal violence in this country. It isn’t a response to actuarial reality,” said Matthew Miller, a Northeastern University and Harvard School of Public Health professor and one of the authors of the study. 

The data suggests that American gun ownership is driven by an “increasing fearfulness”, said Dr Deborah Azrael, a Harvard School of Public Health firearms researcher and the lead author of the study. 

“If we hope to reduce firearm suicide, if we hope to reduce the other potential dangers of guns, my gut is, we have to speak to that fear,” she said.

Gee I wonder who is feeding into that fear?

Wayne LaPierre, NRA Vice President and fear monger.

 Yeah, I actually already knew.

The study also found that the number of guns stolen annually was 400,000.

So the next time some ammosexual jerkwad gets in your face and says that "If guns are criminalized only criminals will have guns" tell him that "The criminals only get those guns from careless legal gun owners like you, asshole!"

Because that is actually the facts.

And most of those stolen guns probably come from these folks:  

While there are an estimated 55 million American gun owners, most own an average of just three firearms, and nearly half own just one or two, according to the survey results. 

Then there are America’s gun super-owners – an estimated 7.7 million Americans who own between eight and 140 guns.

That's right the majority of the guns are in the hands of a small group of sexually inadequate cowards who are hiding under their beds for fear the government is coming to take their metal penis extenders away.

The full report will not be released until the fall of 2017, as the paper is currently being peer reviewed. (That is something that factual scientific documents are subjected to which is in direct opposition to the half baked conspiracy theories and made up "facts" that the Right Wing media is constantly pulling out of their ass.)

However the Duke University researcher who did the 1994 study called this " “a very high-quality survey”.

As you can imagine the NRA has refused to comment on this survey, and other pro-gun organizations have expressed some skepticism at its findings.

Facts, they can be so uncooperative sometimes.

P.S. For those of you experiencing a little deja vu after reading this that might be because it has a lot in common with a CBS News poll released in July of this year.