Gun ownership is on the rise among Republican women, survey finds

Gun ownership has risen sharply among Republican women over the past five years, while firearm ownership has become increasingly aligned with party affiliation, Gallup poll data released Thursday shows.

The new data covers the years of the COVID-19 pandemic, in which Americans continued for a period protracted siphoning of weapons purchases. Industry watchers have long suspected that the boom in gun purchases has widened the demographics of gun ownership in the United States.

Gallup’s poll seems to confirm this impression. Gun ownership is less tied to race, age or gender today than it was in the past, according to the survey data, which is divided into three six-year periods starting in 2007.

But gun ownership seems to be increasingly showing signs of political polarization.

About 19 percent of Democrats surveyed from 2019 to 2024 said they owned firearms — up two points from the six-year period before that and three points down from the six-year period from 2007 to 2012.

The number of Republicans who say they own guns, on the other hand, has risen steadily over that time frame, from 38 percent to 47 percent.

Republican women have seen the most dramatic increase in gun ownership across the party, with 19 percent of them owning guns from 2007 to 2012 and 33 percent in the most recent six-year period.

Fifteen years ago, party affiliation had no significant relationship with gun ownership, according to Gallup Senior Editor Jeff Jones. Other variables were much more clearly associated with gun ownership, such as being white, male, and from either a rural area or the South—although many of these variables overlapped with Republican Party affiliation.

Now, however, variables like race and gender are not as strongly associated with gun ownership as Republican Party identification. Also, independent of other demographic variables, Democrats are less likely to own guns than they were 15 years ago.

“What we’re seeing is that gun ownership is aligning more and more with your political views, where it wasn’t as much in the past,” Jones told HuffPost.

The survey period overlaps with the Democratic Party’s stronger adoption of gun control measures in response to a string of mass shootings. Republicans, by contrast, have generally resisted gun restrictions meant to support public safety, while supporting a growing movement to carry concealed firearms as a constitutional right rather than by permit.

“It’s become an issue like climate change or abortion,” Jones said. “If you’re in this party, that’s what you think and there really isn’t much dissent.”

The Gallup poll appeared to contradict survey results released earlier this year by the National Shooting Sports Federation, the industry trade group, which indicated a sharp increase in the number of new shooters, with self-identified Democrats making up 31 percent of them – about 3 million people.

NSSF spokesman Mark Oliva said he trusted the Gallup data, but questioned why its results diverged from the trends his group’s data seemed to indicate.

Oliva noted that the surveys did not include the same questions and that the NSSF did not survey total gun ownership, broken down by gender and party affiliation combined. He also said that all surveys on gun issues can contain a certain amount of error because of the reluctance to disclose firearm ownership to strangers over the phone.

“Gallup polls have been consistent over the years, but some gun owners can be reluctant to discuss this on the phone,” Olivia told HuffPost.

Both the Gallup and NSSF polls show that overall gun ownership has remained roughly flat, hovering around one-third of Americans.

And data from both groups also indicates that gun owners are becoming more diverse. Gallup polls have not detected a major shift within any specific racial demographic, Jones said, noting that the trend likely reflects the fact that America itself has become more diverse over the past two decades.

Oliva, however, noted that the fastest growing group of gun owners detected by NSSF surveys are women of color.

“The gun owner today is more representative of the rest of America because they are the rest of America,” Oliva told HuffPost.