How many household guns are used in homicides? Nearly none.

Takeaways

• Aside from career crimes and gang related activities, 0.004% of households with guns are involved in gun homicides.

What Started This Analysis

A podcast interviewer sent me a set of questions with which to prep, and he asked about private gun ownership and crime in a way I had not seen phrased before. Given some advances in data and insights into gun homicides, I felt the open question needed to be addressed.

The core question was: “Outside of intentional or spontaneous criminal activities (gangs, robberies, burglaries, aggravated assaults, etc.) what percentage of private gun owners committed a gun homicide?”

Walking Down The Data Highway

First off, we are going to look at household gun ownership rates as opposed to individual person ownership rates. There are an average of 2.5 people per household. Hence, a household with a gun offers 2+ people an opportunity to misuse a gun. As such, it is a better measure of potential danger.

We use 2022 data because that is the most recent NIBRS data we have loaded into our internal Gun Facts data warehouse (yes, we are underfunded, understaffed, and thus behind schedule).

In that year the CDC reports 19,651 gun homicides. From that total we cut out criminal activities to get down to the homicides that are not part of the typical household lifestyle.

First off are gang homicides, the lion’s share of all gun murders. Because the FBI has very strict rules about codifying the circumstances of crimes, the categories of “unknown” and “argument” take up 67% of all homicides and “gang” related murders only 4%.

Anyone reading the news knows that the 4% number is wildly inaccurate. But a detective has to find an irrefutable connection to gang affiliation and activity to classify a murder as “gang related,” and gang members are notoriously uncooperative.

Back in 2021 we triangulated data from the National Gang Center and the CDC, along with some boundary checks, and concluded that 85% of gun homicides were gang related or nexus. Subtracting that, we have 2,948 remaining gun homicides. Comparatively speaking, that isn’t much for a nation of 341,534,046 people (2022).

But there are other crimes aside from gang warfare. The National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS), the replacement for the long-standing FBI Uniform Crime Reporting system, tells us that 28.2% of homicides were associated with other crimes (aggravated assault, robbery, drug/narcotic, kidnapping, burglary, and on and on). Subtracting these from the remaining gun homicides leaves us with 2,116, or about 42 gun homicides per state per year that are not part of other crimes or gang activities.

That ain’t a lot.

Especially when you consider that there were 131,200,000 households in the U.S. that year.

Not every house owns a gun. Major polling companies (Pew, ABC, Gallop, etc.) have shown a consistent 43% household gun ownership rate over the decades. That means there are about 56,416,000 households with guns (and thus about 141,040,000 people who have access to one, but let’s stick to household numbers for now).

When you divide the residual non-crime and non-gang gun homicides by the number of gun owning households, we derive a gun household homicide rate of 0.004%.

So What?

The all-too-common meme that gun availability leads to gun homicides has no nuance at all, and thus is wholly inaccurate. The data shows instead that the typical gun owner isn’t likely at all to commit spontaneous “crimes of passion” or have a sudden interest in a new career in armed robbery.

It does mean we know where to focus if we want less bloodshed.