Gun control isn’t stopping Californians from owning firearms, new study says
California may have some of the nation’s most restrictive gun control laws, from bans on assault rifle sales to mandatory background checks for ammunition sales, but that isn’t stopping Golden State residents from buying firearms.
A quarter of Californians live in a house with a gun, according to a new survey.
The survey, published by the peer-reviewed medical journal BMJ in the magazine “Injury Prevention,” also says that one in seven Californians, an estimated 4.2 million people, owns a firearm.
Researchers reviewed the 2,558 responses to the California Safety and Wellbeing Survey, which was collected in the fall of 2018.
The average number of firearms per gun-owning household in California was five, the survey found, for an estimated statewide total of 19.9 million guns in the Golden State.
More than half (55 percent) of those are long guns, mostly rifles. Handguns made up 56 percent of the most recently acquired firearm.
Nationwide, there are more than 393 million civilian-owned firearms, according to Small Arms Survey, a project of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. That’s more guns than there are Americans.
Most California gun owners were male (73 percent) and white (64 percent), and many were 60 or older (43 percent).
Nearly 70 percent of owners said they bought their last firearm, according to the survey, with the remainder saying it was either an inheritance or a gift. The vast majority (86 percent) of guns were bought from a retailer.
More than half (57 percent) of handgun owners said that it was for protection against people, while long gun owners said sport and hunting were the main reasons they owned that firearm, according to the survey.
“These findings may signal a shift in the underlying drivers of contemporary firearm ownership from participation in hunting and other recreational activities to a perceived need for self-protection, similar to patterns observed on a national level,” according to a statement from BMJ. “And [they] suggest that efforts aimed at reducing firearm death and injury may need to address self-protection as a primary driver of ownership, along with misconceptions about the benefits of having a firearm in the home.”
This story was originally published December 6, 2019 at 12:00 PM with the headline "Gun control isn’t stopping Californians from owning firearms, new study says."
