So, I'm used to seeing charts like these in gun control debates:
Predictably, these are usually shared by the anti-gun control side. However, I've also found graphs which totally contradict the narrative that gun ownership is on the rise.
(
This article makes the claim that 31% of US households owned a gun in 2015, down from 50% in 1977)
Half the gun control debate includes use of statistics, which obviously makes it easy for either side to use cherrypicked studies to their advantage. I'm not sure how these studies produce their data, and honestly I have neither the interest nor the expertise to pick apart each one. I assume there's at least some error in methodology in some of these studies (and of course these are just a few examples), but they seem to get their data from the same sources, all biases aside.
So,
has gun ownership per capita declined in past decades, or has it increased?