The proportion of Americans living in a household with a firearm has dropped over the last 30 years, found a a new RAND study. An estimated 30 percent of the decline was associated with demographic changes. These results suggest that differences in subgroup exposure to firearms violence and the effects of firearm policies may be sensitive to the large differences in households with firearms across the population, says the study published in JAMA Network Open.
The proportion of the population who are unmarried, urban, and from minority racial or ethnic groups has increased over the past 2 decades, and these groups have lower rates of households with firearms. The study showed a showed a 250% increase in households with firearms among married women compared with unmarried women (from 15% to 37%), a far greater increase than that found between unmarried and married men (35% and 45%, respectively). Marriage is disproportionately associated with exposure to household firearms for women compared with men.
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