MONDAY, March 23, 2026 (HealthDay News) -- Nearly 30 million U.S. adults acquired firearms between 2021 and 2024, including more than 11 million people who became gun owners for the first time, according to a study published online March 17 in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Matthew Miller, M.D., Sc.D., from Northeastern University in Boston, and colleagues estimated the number of adults who acquired firearms since Jan. 1, 2021, how many were new owners, and how many other people they newly exposed to household firearms. The analysis included survey responses from 4,059 firearm owners collected in December 2024.
The researchers report that an estimated 29.8 million adults acquired firearms from 2021 to 2024, with 11.2 million adults becoming new gun owners (4.2 percent of U.S. adults). The annual number of new owners declined each year, from 3.6 million in 2021 to 1.9 million by 2024. New owners included women (46.3 percent) and Hispanic people and/or people of color (46.1 percent). An estimated 7.8 million people lived in a household without firearms at the time of their earliest purchase, newly exposing 9.0 million other adults and 6.6 million children to household firearms.
"The risk for violent death has likely increased substantially for millions of Americans who became new gun owners and for millions of other adults and children who were newly exposed to the risks of living in households with guns," the authors write.