The means of defending oneself are more broadly available today than they were in earlier times.
Going back at least to the 1500s, those in power fretted that firearms would let people who lack physical strength or formal combat training defend themselves—even against the state’s trained enforcers. Women have particularly benefited from weapons that operate without relying on muscle. Despite that leveling effect, gun ownership long remained a predominantly male pursuit for cultural reasons that merit investigation. Yet the balance is shifting. Today, the ranks of new gun owners are nearly split between men and women.
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Women Make Up Half of New Gun Purchasers
“In recent years, women made up almost half of all new gun owners, a striking shift from the historical norm, when women accounted for about 24 percent of gun owners,” Rosanna Smart and Andrew R. Morral of the RAND Corporation recently wrote. “After more than a decade of stable gun ownership, women’s ownership rose starkly between 2018 and 2021, going from 10 percent of adult women owning guns in 2018 to 15 percent in 2021, then up again slightly to 16 percent by 2024.”
They add that the notable rise in female gun ownership has occurred since 2018 and, almost without exception, is observed across the board regardless of race, age, income, party affiliation, or education. Men, too, have bought firearms amid record sales driven by the turbulence of 2020, though not to the same transformative degree as women. As broad demand for defense tools has dispelled the notion that gun ownership was a rural white male fixation, women have rushed to harness the empowering technology.
“Some of the largest relative gains were recorded among groups of women who historically had low ownership rates, such as Hispanic women and those in the Upper Midwest, who saw ownership climb more than twofold after 2018,” add the RAND authors.
Smart and Morral rely on data from the General Social Survey (GSS), conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. The GSS figures largely align with other sources.
“Ownership is demographically diverse: 45.7% of validated gun owners are female, 25.6% do not identify as White (alone), and the gap between White Americans (34.6%) and Black Americans (33.0%) has narrowed to under two percentage points,” Georgetown University’s William English wrote last month, referencing data from the National Firearms Survey.
“The growth of female gun ownership documented,” English added, “fits the pattern seen in firearm retailer surveys showing rising female participation since 2020.”
Women, Wheellocks, and the Underreporting of Gun Ownership
This is hardly surprising. Firearms served as powerful equalizers long before that phrase existed. In her book, The Firearm Revolution: From Renaissance Italy to the European Empires, published this year, Catherine Fletcher of Manchester Metropolitan University describes how 16th-century authorities complained about religious minorities and women taking up arms:
In 1553, the Venetian rector Cattarino Zen observed that in Gardone (among other places) “everyone carries an arquebus and…they’re not content with one, but even the women carry two, one in their hand and the other in their belt, both wheellocks, and they’re a bad breed, untameable overbearing Lutherans.”
You can picture the church bigwig fuming at such impudence.
William English placed the firearm ownership rate at 32.7 percent of U.S. adults, roughly matching the figure cited by Smart and Morral. Yet the RAND authors note that this is “quite a bit lower than the ownership rate from two decades prior (40 percent).” That discrepancy seems hard to explain given the surge in gun buying in recent years, especially among newcomers who might not have been captured by earlier surveys. But as Smart and Morral observe, survey results are “subject to error if people do not know or are unwilling to disclose whether they own guns.”
Indeed, Rutgers University researchers concluded in 2023 that many people who claim they do not own firearms misrepresent their status when questioned by strangers. Using probabilistic analysis based on comparing profiles of confirmed gun owners with other respondents, among the 3,500 people in their sample they identified 1,206 confirmed owners, between 1,243 and 2,059 non-owners, and between 220 and 1,036 likely owners lying about their status.
“Our results highlight the potential that several groups, particularly women and people living in urban settings, may be prone to denying firearm ownership,” they concluded.
Given the politically charged nature of firearms, it isn’t surprising that many respondents are less than forthcoming with strangers. That means sources like the GSS and the National Firearms Survey are almost certainly more reliable for sensing the direction of firearms ownership (rising across essentially all Americans) than for pinning down exact percentages of ownership.
Everybody Enjoys the Benefits of Self-Defense
So how can we account for the surge in gun ownership among Americans, including groups that once appeared wary of firearms like minority communities and women? The answer seems evident after the upheavals of 2020 and amid ongoing political strain. Drawing on the National Firearms Survey, English reported that “guns are used defensively by firearms owners in approximately 2.2 million incidents per year. In most defensive incidents no shot was fired (76.3%), about half (50.8%) involved more than one assailant, and in 70.6% of incidents respondents report that the defensive use was successful, such that no crime remained to be reported to the police.”
Smart and Morral note that women with children have been especially quick to acquire firearms. The shift “has been driven almost entirely by single (not cohabiting) mothers, a group that may have been particularly affected by changing attitudes toward personal empowerment and safety concerns during a period of rising violence.” Women predominantly own handguns, which are widely associated with self-defense.
But longer-barrel guns have also gained popularity. English notes that “25.0% of gun owners currently own an AR-15 type rifle” and another 12.9 percent possess similar semiautomatic rifles.
Five centuries after women startled the powerful by tucking wheellock pistols into their belts for protection, they continue to reap the equalizing benefits of the firearm. Not everyone will welcome the fact that American women are increasingly armed and prepared to shield themselves and their households. Yet it remains a verity of empowered life.
