The number of handgun owners carrying a firearm each day has doubled in recent years. This trend toward increased concealed carry was not paired with licensing data. Hopefully, the number of licensed individuals is greater than unlicensed.
"Between increases in the number of people who own handguns and the number of people who carry every day, there has been a striking increase in handgun carrying in the US," says University of Washington epidemiologist Ali Rowhani-Rahbar, who led the study.
“Between increases in the number of people who own handguns and the number of people who carry every day, there has been a striking increase in handgun carrying in the US,” says lead author Ali Rowhani-Rahbar, a professor of epidemiology and professor for the study and prevention of violence at the University of Washington.
6 million handgun owners carried a handgun on their person every day in 2019
Nearly 6 million Americans were toting loaded handguns on a daily basis in 2019, up from about 3 million just four years prior, according to estimates in a new study from researchers at the University of Washington and Harvard's TH Chan School of Public Health.
In this nationally representative study conducted in 2019 (NFS-2019), we found that about 3 in 10 handgun owners carried a loaded handgun on their person in the past 30 days; among those, about 4 in 10 did so every day. Extrapolating to the estimated 53 million US adults who owned handguns in 2019, we estimate that about 16 million US adults carried a handgun in the past 30 days (up from 9 million in 2015), and that almost 6 million did so every day (twice the approximately 3 million who did so in 2015).4,7
Rowhani-Rahbar and his co-authors assessed the results of the National Firearms Survey, which asked more than 2,000 handgun owners about their carrying habits. They applied that nationally representative data to the estimated 53 million US adults who owned handguns in 2019, concluding that about 16 million adults carried a loaded handgun at least once a month, and 6 million did so daily.
The majority who reported carrying a firearm were white, male, and aged 18–44
About half of white men (48%) say they own a gun. By comparison, about a quarter of white women and nonwhite men (24% each) own guns, along with 16% of nonwhite women. 2 There is also an education gap in gun ownership and that, too, is particularly pronounced among whites: 41% of whites without a bachelor’s degree are gun owners, compared with about a quarter of whites with at least a bachelor’s degree (26%).
About seven in 10 of survey respondents who carried loaded handguns said they did so for protection from other people, rather than for work, recreation, or protection against animals. Four in five handgun owners were male, and three in four were white. The study did not ask respondents whether they concealed their guns or carried them openly.
Demographically, those who chose to carry a gun in public in 2019 were more likely to live in the south, the study found. Four in five gun carriers were male, and three in four were white, Rowhani-Rahbar said. Other demographic factors, like education and household income, did not make a difference in whether gun owners chose to carry their guns in public or not, he said. About a quarter of the gun carriers had a household income of at least $125,000 a year, and nearly a third had graduated from college, the researchers found.
