CCRKBA: ‘SECOND WAVE’ NAT’L FIREARMS SURVEY HITS BULLSEYE

BELLEVUE, WA – A newly-released “second wave” of the National Firearms Survey by Prof. William English at the McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University shows an estimated 88 million citizens own some 461 million firearms, including more than 40 million modern semiautomatic rifles, affirming such rifles are in “commonly use” and therefore should be protected by the Second Amendment.

The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA) says the new survey contains updated information on the number of people who carry firearms for personal protection, and estimates there are approximately 2.2 million defensive uses of firearms per year.

“The new survey also shows at least 25 percent of American gun owners currently own an AR-15 type rifle, 12.9% currently own other similarly styled semi-automatic rifles, and 30.0% – approximately 26.4 million adults – currently own at least one firearm in one of these two categories,” noted CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “This updated National Firearms Survey is loaded with information and it is presented in an easy-to-understand narrative. Honestly, this new survey comes at a very important moment, considering that we’re looking at a major Supreme Court case on the constitutionality of laws banning AR-15 type rifles and pistols, probably sometime this fall.

“The Citizens Committee is particularly interested in the number of law-abiding Americans who carry firearms for personal safety in public places,” he added. “With all of those millions of legally armed private citizens responsibly carrying firearms, it explodes another myth of the gun ban bunch, that more guns in private hands leads to more crime. As we recently noted, thanks to updated FBI data, that is simply not the case.

“Once again, as we were back in 2021 when Prof. English published his initial research survey, we’re grateful for the effort he put into this project,” Gottlieb said. “This is the kind of hard data which the gun prohibition lobby and their allies in Congress, state legislatures and the media simply cannot ignore, no matter how hard they try. We won’t let them get away with it.”