Women Are Better Armed Than Ever

At least as far back as the 16th century, the powers that be fretted that firearms grant those of lesser physical strength and lacking martial training the ability to defend themselves—even against the state’s professional enforcers. Women have particularly benefited from weapons that work independent of muscle mass. Despite that equalizing power, gun ownership long remained a largely masculine pursuit for cultural reasons that might be worthy of research. But women have been catching up. These days, the ranks of new gun owners break down almost evenly between the sexes.

Women Are Half of New Gun Owners

“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 big surge in women’s gun ownership has occurred since 2018 and, almost without exception, is seen across the board without regard to race, age, income, party identification, or education. Men, too, have bought guns amidst record firearms sales boosted by the chaos of 2020, though not to the same transformative extent as women. As broad demand for the means of self-defense has put the lie to the already overstated argument that gun ownership was a passing fixation of rural white men, women have rushed to take advantage of the empowering technology.

“Some of the largest relative increases were among groups of women with historically low rates of gun ownership, such as Hispanic women and those living in the Upper Midwest, who saw ownership rates more than double after 2018,” add the RAND authors.

Smart and Morral draw on data from the General Social Survey (GSS), which is conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. The GSS numbers largely square 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 in ownership rates between White Americans (34.6%) and Black Americans (33.0%) has narrowed to less than two percentage points,” Georgetown University’s William English wrote last month, of numbers from the National Firearms Survey.

“The growth of female gun ownership documented,” English added, “is consistent with the picture painted by firearm retail surveys of surging female participation since 2020.”

Women, Wheellocks, and Underreported Gun Ownership

This should be no surprise. Guns were “great equalizers” long before that term was coined. In her book, The Firearm Revolution: From Renaissance Italy to the European Empires, published this year, Catherine Fletcher of Manchester Metropolitan University described how 16th century authority figures 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 imagine the church bigwig seething at such insolence.

William English put the firearm ownership rate at 32.7 percent of U.S. adults, which is roughly comparable to the figure cited by Smart and Morral. But as the RAND authors note, this is “quite a bit lower than the ownership rate from two decades prior (40 percent).” That seems inexplicable given the surge in gun purchases in recent years, many among the expanding ranks of new owners who would not have been counted in previous surveys. But as Smart and Morral comment, survey results are “subject to error if people do not know or are unwilling to disclose whether they own guns.”

In fact, Rutgers University researchers determined in 2023 that many people who claim to not own firearms fib when questioned by people they don’t know. Working with probabilities based on comparing profiles of confirmed gun owners against other respondents, of 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 individuals living in urban environments, may be prone to falsely denying firearm ownership,” they concluded.

Given the fraught politics around firearms, it’s no surprise 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 detecting the direction of firearms ownership (increasing for essentially all types of Americans) rather than for determining hard percentages of ownership.

Everybody Enjoys the Benefits of Self-Defense

So, how to explain the surge in gun ownership among Americans, especially communities that previously seemed firearms-averse like minorities and women? The answer seems obvious after the riots of 2020 and with the country’s ongoing political tensions. But 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 add that women with children have been especially quick to acquire guns. The shift “has been driven almost entirely by single (not cohabitating) 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 mostly own handguns, which are closely identified with self-defense.

But some long guns have also been popular. English reports that “25.0% of gun owners currently own an AR-15 type rifle” with another 12.9 percent owning similar semiautomatic rifles.

Five hundred years after women horrified the powerful by tucking wheellock pistols in their belts for self-defense, they’re still benefiting from the equalizing power of the gun. Not all people will be pleased that American women are increasingly armed and ready to protect themselves and their families. But it’s a fact of empowered life.