I don’t like the idea of a weapon needing to be “in common use” before a government is barred from trying to ban something. This means that a particularly quick legislature might ban some new weapon before it can gain sufficient popularity to be commonly owned, which is troubling on so many levels. While we might not see it in our day and age, the future holds many mysteries, including what weapons technology will look like.
But for now, “in common use” is the standard.
And a new report is bound to dash the hopes of anti-gunners who think they can sell the Supreme Court on the weapons not being that common.
A new survey of nearly 17,000 gun owners has found AR-15 ownership now reaches the 40 million mark, and that women and people of color make up an ever-larger share of buyers.
The 2026 National Firearms Survey, published on Saturday, examined firearm ownership and use across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. It determined 25 percent of gun owners report they currently have an AR-15, and an additional 12.9 percent said they own a similar semi-automatic rifle–putting the combined number of owners somewhere around 26.4 million. It also found that more people of color and women are choosing to own guns, a trend that picked up speed during the COVID-19 pandemic and persisted in the years since. Gun ownership among nearly every minority group increased from the last National Firearms Survey fielded in 2021.
“In sum, firearms ownership has continued to grow, and firearms owners are more diverse than ever,” Georgetown Professor William English, who conducted the survey, wrote.
The survey is among the broadest and most comprehensive scientific looks at firearms ownership and use patterns available to date. Its findings on those fronts may help shape the legal and political conversation around firearms. The continued diversification of gun ownership the survey identified may influence how politicians approach gun regulation, and the widespread popularity of AR-15s and other guns commonly targeted by “assault weapons” bans it found could impact how the Supreme Court decides on the constitutionality of those bans in an upcoming case–especially since the Court’s standard for deciding whether a gun restriction violates the Second Amendment is grounded in whether the gun is in “common use.”
English, an assistant professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, conducted the first wave of the survey five years ago. He argued his approach, which involves using a polling company to field a large pool of online respondents in order to achieve a representative sample in every state, provided more substantive insight than previous survey-based research on American gun owners.
We’ve talked about another aspect of English’s work recently, namely his findings on defensive gun uses.
And 17,000 is not a small sample size by any stretch of the imagination. However, keep something in mind here.
A lot of gun owners are skeptical of talking to pollsters who call them up. They’re paranoid, to some degree, that the information will be stored in some way that will allow the feds to know who has what kind of firearms, and I don’t know that they’re wrong to be concerned. They might be, but I can’t say so definitively.
Even so, we’re looking at a whopping 40 million AR-15s in private hands. That’s more than 10 percent of all Americans who have an AR-15. That’s counting everyone, not just adults. There are about 270 million adults, which means nearly 15 percent own one.
That’s roughly on par with the number of Americans who hold a master’s degree, which is common enough as to not really warrant much fanfare.
How can you say they’re not in common use?
That’s more than twice the number of Ford F-Series pickup trucks on the road, and those are the most popular vehicles in the country. They’re common enough, yet only about 17 million of them are running around.
I don’t like “in common use” as a standard, but between this and Justice Elena Kagan noting that it was the most popular rifle in the country in Mexico v. Smith & Wesson, it seems the idea that they’re bannable should be dead and buried.
Especially with the Supreme Court set to take up a case challenging just such a ban.
English’s timing couldn’t have been better.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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