A recent study on gun ownership in the United States revealed that about a third of Americans own at least one gun. The study, published in the journal Injury Prevention, also specified the number and profile of gun owners in the country.
The study found a "strong association between social gun culture and gun ownership" and said that gun cultures may need to be addressed in public health strategies aiming to make changes in U.S. gun ownership. It also showed that most people who owned guns were male, white, married and aged 55 years and above.
According to a 2014 American Academy of Pediatrics report, 500 American children die every year from gunshot wounds, as reported in NBC News. Other studies also reported an increase in suicide rates arising from easy access to guns.
Currently, no agency keeps track of gun ownership figures, and many pro-gun advocates push to keep such information private.
To find out the number of gun owners, researchers led by Bindu Kalesan, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia University, carried out a survey on 4,000 people. Participants were simply asked if they owned a gun and what their opinion was concerning gun ownership.
According to the survey report, one-third of Americans said they owned a gun. The state with the lowest percentage of gun owners was Delaware at 5.2% while the highest was Alaska at 61.7%.
The report also showed that "gun ownership was 2.25 times greater among those reporting a social gun culture than those who did not."
In the Northeast, Rhode Island appears to have the lowest recorded gun ownership, at 5.8 percent. For the Midwest, Ohio was the lowest at 19.6% while in the West, California was the lowest at 20%.
On the other hand, Alaska, Dakota and Vermont were found to have the highest number of gun owners, at 61.7%, 47.9% and 28.8%, respectively. Arkansas had the highest number in the South at 57.9%.
