Americans are interesting people, far more intelligent than politicians and the media are willing to credit. They make reality-based decisions; most aren’t rich enough to do otherwise, relying on wealth to insulate them from stupid, though politically popular, policies. This is particularly true where their gun-buying in response to the trends of the last half century is concerned:
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For most of the 20th century, the American gun owner’s household was defined by the long gun. The rifle over the fireplace, the shotgun in the closet, the family hunting tradition. That picture has flipped. Today the handgun sits at the center of American gun ownership, and the change didn’t happen overnight. It unfolded over roughly half a century, and the data lays it out with unusual clarity.
Graphic: A Colt AR-15. Author.
Wake Forest sociologist David Yamane — a lifelong liberal and self-described late-in-life gun owner who became a first-time buyer at age 42 — describes this as the handgunization of American firearms, a phenomenon spanning the past 50 years. His characterization is blunt. By his telling, the handgun has stopped being a mere accessory in the gun owner’s household. Yamane calls it the undisputed centerpiece. If you’ve bought a gun in the last decade or two, odds are it was a pistol, and the numbers below explain why that feels so normal now.
Start with the long view. In 1973, 40.9 percent of gun-owning homes kept at least one handgun. By 2024, that figure had climbed to 80.4 percent — an all-time high. In other words, the share of gun-owning homes with a handgun roughly doubled over five decades.
Graphic: Glock 17. Author.
That’s certainly remarkable, but rational and predictable. The Second Amendment doesn’t address hunting or sport shooting, but self-defense and citizens’ ability to rise up against an oppressive government. Democrats hate all of that, particularly the rising up part. So, why should “handgunization” occur? Because while long guns predominate in military combat, handguns are the best compromise for daily concealed carry, and arguably, home defense:
Around 2010, self-defense pushed past hunting and recreation to become the main reason Americans owned firearms.
That reordering of motives still holds today. Among gun owners, protection ranks as a major reason for 72 percent, according to the Pew Research Center. Compare that with 32 percent who cite hunting, 30 percent who point to sport shooting, and 15 percent who name gun collection. When protection drives the purchase, the handgun wins. It’s concealable, it stays by the bedside, it’s what a concealed carrier reaches for. The handgunization of America is, at its root, the self-defense-ization of America.
This illustrates the awakening:
Between 2020 and 2023, more than 21 million Americans picked up a firearm for the first time. To appreciate how large that is, consider the baseline: in 2019, before the pandemic, roughly 2.4 million people bought a first gun.
Then the floodgates opened. In 2020, first-time gun owners numbered 8.4 million. The pace cooled afterward — first-time buyers fell to 5.4 million in 2021 and 4.8 million in 2023 — but even the slower years dwarfed 2019.
I suspect the author’s figures are low, as we know from federal background checks at FFL dealers that more than a million guns per month have been purchased over the last five years. In any case, the point is clear: the COVID hoax greatly increased Americans’ distrust of government, which, in combination with out-of-control crime, defunding the police, and Democrat overreach and never-ending attempts to disarm Americans, convinced them to arm themselves in unprecedented numbers, particularly women:
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In 1980, only 10 percent of American women owned guns, against 50 percent of American men. Today, 25 percent of women say a gun is theirs personally, per Pew, and 40 percent of men do. Women closing that gap reshapes the market, and it pushes toward handguns — nearly half of all new gun buyers between January 2019 and April 2021 were women, per the Wall Street Journal’s reporting on the 2021 National Firearms Survey.
More blacks and Hispanics than ever before have become first-time gun owners, and rural Americans continue to own more guns than city or city suburb dwellers.
In Conan the Barbarian, Arnold Schwarzenegger was asked what is best in life. He replied:
“To crush your enemies, see dem driven before you, and hear dah lamentations of dah vimin.”
These positive trends in support of the Second Amendment, common sense, and reality might inspire this reply today:
“To crush the gun grabbers, see them driven from office, and to hear the lamentations of journalists.”
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Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, lifelong athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer, and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.
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