According to the Gun Violence Archive, the U.S. has had 340 mass shootings so far this year.

Millions of Americans who never owned a gun purchased a firearm during the period just before the COVID lockdown through April 2021.

And a new report from the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center finds that number may be underestimated.

Data shows more people are falsely denying owning firearms.

I asked the lead author of the study, Allison Bond, about what the findings mean.

Allison, welcome to the show.

You looked at a lot of data, collected a lot of data about gun owners.

I'm curious what you found specifically about folks who have purchased guns in these last few years.

Absolutely, yes.

So we're seeing a change in firearm ownership since the purchasing surge that started in 2020.

And specifically in our study, we looked at folks who might own firearms but not want to tell researchers that they own firearms.

And why is it I mean, what are they hesitant about owning a firearm to share either with the government or with you all?

Yeah, great question.

That's that's the thing that we're interested in as well.

And we don't have the data to specifically kind of get to that.

But we have a few hypotheses for why that might be the case.

So, for instance, it might be that some folks own firearms illicitly and they don't feel comfortable really telling anybody that they own firearms.

It may also be that there's a distrust between the researchers that are conducting research and the firearm owning community really speaking to the need for, you know, craft discipline efforts to reduce firearm injury and death.

Are a lot of these folks who own the firearms now new or are they first time gun owners?

Are they, you know, seasoned license holders?

And does the data bear any of that out?

Yes, I think it's a little bit of both.

So we are seeing some folks who were firearm owners before the purchasing surge, before that March 2020 timeframe.

And then we're seeing some folks who are purchasing firearms for the first time since March 2020.

And what we see about those individuals is that they look demographically different than what we typically think of as a firearm owner.

So often people think of white middle age or older men living in rural environments as firearm owners.

And we're starting to see women own firearms more and racial ethnic minorities owning firearms more.

So.

Okay.

Break this down for us then.

When you're unable to collect real data on exactly who those groups are, how many are out there?

What does that do to the research we do have?

How does it skew it when folks are reluctant to come forward with that information?

Absolutely.

It definitely makes us a little worried that we're not accurately capturing all types of firearm owners in the US Promoters aren't a homogeneous group.

It's not a one size fits all model when it comes to firearm ownership.

And so we might be missing different subgroups that are out there making it really hard to reach those folks with things like secure firearm storage or ways to store firearms safely, which we know ultimately can reduce risk for firearm injury and death.

Yeah, I mean, we've had so much focus on gun ownership, a lot of it because of the spike in gun violence.

Is there any correlation in your data between the uptick of folks who are looking to own a firearm or have one now and rises in that violence?

Did you look at that at all?

We didn't look at that in this study.

I think that it's it's difficult to determine how many firearms are purchased each year in the US.

But the data does indicate that there was this was really a big increase in rates and we are seeing firearm injury and death rates increase as well.

So it's something to keep an eye on for future research.

Allison Bond with the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.