If, like me, you are sickened by the seemingly inexorable accumulation of innocent young bodies, Wayne LaPierre's ever-growing wealth and obviously boundless venality, as well as the increasingly in-your-face acting out by open-carry Texas mall ninjas and other assorted gun fetishists, it's probably easy...and superficially rational...to succumb to the hopeless feeling that we're making no progress whatsoever in the endless struggle for gun sanity. And by any number of reasonable metrics you would certainly seem to be right. But take heart, and keep the faith: by one vitally important and too little-noted measure it is clear that we are, slowly but surely, actually winning. The Bad Guys know this, are loath to discuss it, and this explains their increasingly frantic flailings of late. I think it's time we Good Guys know the good news, too. So let's do some important numbers.
First though, I owe you a quick truth-in-advertising disclaimer. I'm a gun owner and a fan of shooting sports (marksmanship, skeet shooting, biathlon and cowboy mounted shooting). A midwestern rural childhood spent hunting varmints for local farmers, plus membership on my high school rifle team, pretty much insured I'd grow up this way. But I'm a gun safety freak (if one of my guns isn't actually in my hand, it's locked up and unloaded, and woe betide anyone who handles a gun unsafely around me). I didn't let either of my boys so much as touch a gun before they were in junior high. And my personal defense strategy is the same as my highway defense strategy: get the hell outta Dodge.
Now, on to the good news.
As the New York Times reported over a year ago, the National Opinion Research Center's respected General Social Survey, conducted regularly since 1972 with scrupulous attention to proper statistical methodology, demonstrates that the household rate of gun ownership in the U.S. has been declining steadily and significantly since the 1970s. In the 70s, 50% of U.S. households owned guns. In the 80s, 49% did, in the 90s only 43% did. By the mid 2000s this was down sharply to 35%, and in 2012, just 34% of households owned guns.
This is, indeed, good news. It suggests (to me, anyway) that just as we now see that marriage equality is demographically inevitable (as old bigots die off they are replaced by more tolerant youth), so too a reversal of the Fortress America mentality is equally inevitable. As ever more kids grow up in gun-free homes, fewer grow up to be householders who mindlessly assume that a gun is as commonplace and important a possession as a refrigerator.
Statistically savvy but glass-half-empty types might demand "OK, so percentage-wise household gun ownership is declining, but the number of households is always growing, so what are the absolute numbers? Merging census data regarding the number of U.S. households with the General Social Survey data, here they are:
Mid '70s: 36 million gun-owning households
Mid '80s: 42 million
Mid '90s: 43 million
Mid '00s: 40 million
2012: 41 million
So here, too, the news is good; since the 1980s, the absolute number of households with guns has held essentially flat -- or is maybe even declining slowly -- even as the total number of households has grown by 40%.
Now I'll be the first to admit that this is only one favorable data point in a sea of unfavorable ones. But it is important to note, nonetheless. First of all, it's a bright spot, and we gun sanity advocates desperately need one for the sake of our own sanity. Second, depend on the fact that gun manufacturers, merchandisers, and their pimp (the NRA) know this statistic all too well, and it scares the bejeezus out of them. The world is changing around them. Ideologically-driven gun nuts are dying off, and they're not being replaced at steady state. Certainly they're not dying off fast enough for the sake of all the innocent little bodies, but it's happening. So keep the faith, and keep up the good work.
End note: for those readers who can't quite wrap their heads around how a gun owner can be a gun sanity crusader who finds encouragement in declining gun ownership, allow me to explain. I'm also a huge fan of chainsaws, and own several (living, as I do, on a farm with thousands of trees). But I would be very discouraged to see chainsaw ownership rising sharply in America...they're dangerous tools, too many people aren't prepared to handle them safely, and only a small fraction of the population has any cause to own them. If innocent children were regularly being hacked apart with chainsaws, and mall ninjas were brandishing them in restaurants, and chainsaw industry shills were demanding a chainsaw in every school room, I'd certainly be fighting to limit their availability, too.