William English is back with another comprehensive survey on gun ownership and defensive gun use (DGUs).
After his 2021 National Firearms Survey, for having the temerity to do a huge survey on defensive gun use in the U.S. that was not forced into the narrative of today’s gun-control activism, English, of Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, was subpoenaed, attacked in The New York Times, ridiculed by many other “mainstream” outlets and, basically, pilloried in order to, as he put it in The Wall Street Journal, “warn off other academics thinking of doing similar research, and to influence courts where states are losing on the merits.”
Data from the 2021 survey estimated that armed citizens use their guns defensively about 1.67 million times annually; and, indeed, the survey found that “in most defensive incidents (81.9 percent) no shot was fired.”
This data drove anti-gun advocates crazy.
Now, the 2026 National Firearms Survey estimates that armed citizens in America use their guns 2.2 million to defend themselves or others.
English is sure to be attacked—or maybe just ignored—again. The 2026 survey is of 16,688 “internally validated gun owners who answered in-depth questions concerning their ownership and use of firearms, including questions about using a firearm in self-defense.”
This data is endlessly fascinating and is undoubtedly much too honest for gun-control advocates to stomach.
The survey said this about the defensive use of firearms by armed citizens:
- 37.6 percent of gun owners, or approximately 33.1 million adult Americans, have used a gun in defense of themselves, their property, a family member, or a member of their household.
- In most cases (76.3 percent), the gun is not fired.
- Gun owners engage in approximately 2.2 million defensive uses of firearms per year.
- The majority of defensive gun uses (74.6 percent) take place outside of the home.
- About half of defensive gun uses (50.8 percent) involve more than one assailant.
- Handguns (74.0 percent) are the firearm most commonly used in defensive incidents, followed by rifles (16.4 percent) and shotguns (9.6 percent).
- In 70.6 percent of defensive incidents, the defense was successful, such that no crime remained to be reported to the police; 8.4 percent of defensive incidents were against animal threats.
- The median age at which reported defensive incidents occurred was 29, and 45.8 percent of reported incidents occurred within approximately the past five years.
To get gun owners to open up—many researchers have pointed out that armed citizens prefer privacy about the guns they own—English promised them privacy. Still, he used detailed questions and other means to vet them.
“First, all gun owners were asked, ‘Have you ever defended yourself, your property, a family member, or a member of your household with a firearm, even if it was not fired or displayed? Please do not include military service, police work, or work as a security guard,’” says the report.
When the answers were added up, the researchers found that both men and women reported “having used firearms defensively at high rates, with 41.0 percent of male gun owners and 33.4 percent of female gun owners indicating a defensive use.”
The summary of this survey even says that “even the most conservative reading of this data exceeds the range that critics of survey-based DGU estimates have asserted. Rather, the estimates derived from this survey are within the range of ‘about 500,000 to more than 3 million’ suggested by the National Academies’ review of this literature.”
Those are figures gun-control advocates actually lobbied the Biden administration to cut from government websites.
This new survey also determined that in “70.6 percent of defensive incidents, respondents report that the defensive use of the firearm was successful, such that no crime remained to be reported to the police. This finding sheds light on longstanding debates regarding the relationship between survey based defensive gun use estimates and official crime statistics. Precisely because the successful use of a gun to defend oneself presumably prevents a crime from being committed in many cases, such incidents would never appear in police reports or victimization surveys that require that a crime occurred. It is also notable that 8.4 percent of defensive incidents were directed against animal threats rather than criminal threats.”
This data is a direct refutation of the anti-gun claim that guns in American households do not make homeowners safer.
Indeed, this survey asked respondents if they fired a gun in a self-defense incident and, in 76.3 percent of the cases, people surveyed said they did not need to shoot their gun to stop an incident. “Rather, displaying a firearm (50.9 percent of incidents) or threatening to use a firearm (25.3 percent) was sufficient,” found this survey.
The author of this survey even concludes that “[t]his again suggests that firearms have a powerful deterrent effect on crime, which, in most cases, does not depend on a gun actually being fired or an aggressor being injured. Among the incidents in which the gun was fired, the average number of shots was 3.9, and multiple rounds were fired in 70.4 percent of cases.”
Interestingly, about a quarter (25.4 percent) of DGUs took place within the armed citizen’s home, and about half (53.3 percent) occurred outside their home but on their property. Only 11.7 percent of DGUs occurred in public, and about 2.2 percent occurred at work.
“Presumably, part of the value of using a firearm in self-defense is that it serves as a force multiplier against more powerful or more numerous assailants,” says this report. “Survey responses confirm that encountering multiple assailants is not an infrequent occurrence in defensive incidents. 32.9 percent of defensive incidents involved two assailants, and 17.9 percent involved three or more, while slightly less than half (49.2 percent) involved a single assailant.”
As for concealed carriers, this survey determined that a majority of gun owners (70.0 percent) said that there are some circumstances for which they carry a handgun for self-defense.
Also, about a third of gun owners (36.0 percent) indicated they wanted to carry a handgun for self-defense but that local laws prohibit them from doing so.
Most of the respondents (91.6 percent) said they own a handgun, 63.5 percent report owning a rifle, and 53.6 percent report owning a shotgun.
The “average gun owner owns about 5.2 firearms,” found the survey. “Overall, Americans own approximately 461 million firearms, consisting of approximately 208 million handguns, 154 million rifles, and 99 million shotguns,” indicates the data.
The survey, when compared to the 2021 survey, found that adult firearm ownership has risen from 31.9 percent to 32.7 percent and the female share of gun owners has risen from 42.2 percent to 45.7 percent.
Also, the black ownership rate went up from 25.4 percent in 2021 to 33.0 percent in 2026, according to this data.
The defensive use of firearm (meaning the people who used a gun at some point in their lives defensively) went from 31.1 percent to 37.6 percent.
As previously stated, the much-published estimate of defensive gun uses per year, according to this survey, went from 1.67 million per year in 2021, to 2.2 million in 2026.
In addition, the gun owners who said they carry a handgun in some circumstances went from 56.2 percent in 2021 to 70.0 percent in 2026.
This, of course, is only a first look at this data. It is not difficult to see that it will infuriate gun-control advocates, as it refutes many of their cherished false narratives.
