“Nearly one in every three Americans owns a gun, according to a study published in The Journal Injury Prevention by researchers Bindu Kalesan, Marcos Villarreal, and Katherine Keyes of Columbia University, and Sandro Galea of Boston University.” That’s how businessinsider.com came up with the gun ownership map above back in July 2015.
Thanks to American gun owners’ justifiably paranoid nature [sic], it’s impossible to know the map’s accuracy. If it is true-to-life, if the gun sales surge in the intervening two years hasn’t boosted percentages (especially in Alabama and New Mexico), there are only six states where the majority of the population owns guns: Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Arkansas, Alaska and West Virginia.
Those states are hardly what you’d call large population centers. We know — well, surmise — that gun ownership rates have been increasing across the country, thanks to once-rampant Obama-phobia and gun rights restoration for concealed and open carry. Will America’s most populous states ever be “turned” for gun ownership? Will America one day be a country where most of its inhabitants own guns?