By Kyra Theodore
@redlineproject
Guns are everywhere in America, but their role — and how they’re owned — changes drastically from state to state. In some places, they are abundant yet not widely owned by individuals. In others, firearms are tools for everyday life. Two key metrics — total registered firearms and gun ownership rates — offer a glimpse into this divide.
The first map focuses on the number of registered firearms by state. It’s no surprise that Texas tops the list with over 1 million registered guns. Florida follows with 518,725 guns, while Virginia, California, and Pennsylvania round out the top five, each with over 300,000 registered firearms.
Interestingly, the states with the highest numbers of registered firearms do not necessarily align with the states that have the highest ownership rate.
High-population states like Texas, Florida (518,725 firearms), and California (406,360 firearms) top the charts in volume. Yet their ownership rates fall short: 45.7% in Texas, 32.5% in Florida, and just 28.3% in California.
By contrast, smaller states like Montana, Wyoming and Alaska reveal the urban-rural divide between gun ownership. Montana leads with nearly 66% of its residents owning at least one firearm. In Wyoming, 60.2% of residents own guns. That’s nearly double Texas’s rate, despite Wyoming’s modest 132,806 registered firearms. Their populations are smaller, but their reliance on firearms is proportionally greater. Compare that to New Jersey, where only 8.9% of the population owns a gun — the lowest in the nation. Urban density, strict gun laws, and a different culture around firearms drive this low figure.
Together, these maps show where guns are most concentrated and how essential they are to the people who own them.