A CNN report drawn from a recent survey of gun owners shows that more Americans are armed for self-defense than ever before.
CNN noted that the survey, published Thursday, centered on 2,477 “American adults who reported owning guns between May and June 2023.”
The report cited data from Injury Prevention journal, which revealed the percentage of gun owners that cited “personal protection” as the reason for getting a gun jumped from 26 percent in 1999 to 79 percent in 2024.
Dr. David Yamane, a professor of sociology at Wake Forest University, suggested the desire to be armed for self-defense is a response to the civil unrest America witnessed during COVID years.
Yamane claimed 2020 had much of the same unrest seen in the 1960s, when gun ownership for self-defense grew exponentially. He noted:
If you think about the year of 2020, it really had some of those characteristics. There was Covid, which rolls immediately into the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests, which rolls immediately then into an insane presidential election that rolls immediately into the insurrection at the Capitol.
On January 12, Breitbart News pointed to National Shooting Sport Foundation (NSSF) numbers showing the number of firearms in U.S. civilian hands topped 473 million by the end of 2021.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio, a member of Gun Owners of America, and the director of global marketing for Lone Star Hunts. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in 2010 and has a Ph.D. in Military History. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at
