Stipulated in advance: the Left wants to grab your guns. They're careful about their audiences where and when they say it, but looking at the legislation they've jammed down in California, Virginia, and once-read Colorado, they are clearly hiding the ball from the gullible.
Also noted in advance: it's become a bit of a meme on the Right that "white progressive women" are the biggest challenge facing our society today.
With both of those points in mind, this next story has got to be giving the gun control lobby indigestion today.
The ladies are strapping up; while a trite, clueless but noisy portion of the fairer sex theatrically fusses about choosing between being stuck in the woods with bears or men, more sensible women comprise the fastest growing segment among American gun owners; I'll add some emphasis:
Between 2020 and 2022, more than 7.5 million people bought their first gun, and an estimated 60 million new firearms entered the U.S. civilian market. An unprecedented number of these purchasers were women. 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. While previous reports on increased gun ownership among women have been overstated, our analysis confirms a notable uptick in female gun ownership that was widespread across geographic and demographic subgroups.
And the crosstabs are genuinely striking as well:
Based on the GSS [the "General Social Survey, a large controlled survey of adults in the United States, conducted by the University of Chicago], women's personal ownership of firearms increased substantially in recent years. 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. Other national surveys, such as Pew's American Trends Panel, report similar trends in women's gun ownership over this period (although prevalence estimates differ from GSS, likely due to differences in question wording and sampling). Over the same period, men's gun ownership remained relatively flat; the percentage of men who own guns as of 2024 (36 percent) is now quite a bit lower than the ownership rate from two decades prior (40 percent). The result is a continued narrowing of the gender gap in gun ownership, which has fallen from 29 percentage points in 2004 to 19 percentage points in 2024.
Of course, if you're a Second Amendment supporter, any time gun ownership breaks outside the stereotype of the white middle-aged rural guy, it's a good sign — that gun ownership is becoming a broad social imperative rather than the province of one particular demographic group:
Compared with ownership a decade ago, however, the proportion of U.S. adults who own firearms today is meaningfully larger, especially among subgroups historically underrepresented among gun owners. For example, 22% of adults were estimated to own firearms in 2015, corresponding to a total of 55 million firearm owners (72% of whom were men and 81% of whom were White) (5). Today, almost 29% of U.S. adults own firearms (approximately 77 million persons). Firearm ownership seems to have increased from 12% to 19% among women and from 15% to 25% among Black adults compared with smaller relative increases among traditional gun owning subgroups (for example, from 32% to 39% among men and from 26% to 34% among White adults) (5). To what extent these changes may have contributed to increases in firearm and overall suicide among the U.S. population, or among racial and ethnic subgroups, is beyond the scope of our study.
As the Supreme Court heads into a session with some key cases on the docket, it's good for the 2nd Amendment movement to be tightening up those social loose ends.
