On August 26, 2026, Professor William English of Georgetown University released the second wave of the National Firearms Survey, and the timing is extraordinary. The Supreme Court has granted certiorari in Viramontes v. Cook County, No. 25-238, out of the Seventh Circuit, and Grant v. Higgins, No. 25-566, out of the Second Circuit, and consolidated them for argument. Together they will decide whether Cook County, Illinois and the State of Connecticut may ban the AR-15. Merits briefs from our side and from the amici supporting us are due over the coming week. This survey lands exactly as the evidentiary record on common use is being assembled.
What the Second Wave Actually Measured
The survey was administered online in July and August of 2026 to a representative sample of 51,398 U.S. residents aged eighteen and over, and it identified 16,688 internally validated gun owners who then answered in-depth questions about their ownership and use of firearms, including questions about defensive use. The paper runs roughly seventy-five pages, is publicly available on SSRN, and takes up the scholarly criticisms leveled at English’s 2021 survey — a subject that deserves closer treatment than I can give it here.
The topline: Americans own approximately 461 million firearms, consisting of approximately 208 million handguns, 154 million rifles, and 99 million shotguns. 32.7% of American adults — roughly 88 million people — personally own firearms. The average owner owns about 5.2 guns, and 91.6% of owners own at least one handgun.
Forty Million Rifles Is Not “Unusual”
Now the findings that speak directly to the cases. 25.0% of gun owners currently own an AR-15-type rifle. Another 12.9% own other similarly styled semi-automatic rifles. Thirty percent of gun owners — approximately 26.4 million American adults — own at least one firearm in one of those two categories. The totals: approximately 40 million AR-15-type rifles and 20 million other similarly styled rifles.
Forty million. Measure that against any other object Americans commonly own or any other activity they commonly pursue, and the conclusion is unavoidable. A class of arms held by tens of millions of law-abiding citizens is in common use for lawful purposes.
The burden is what the other side keeps trying to invert. Under District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), the government must prove that a weapon typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes is nevertheless dangerous and unusual. It is not our obligation to justify the AR-15. It is their obligation to prove that forty million rifles are unusual. I have been making that argument for years, and I have yet to see an answer to it.
2.2 Million Defensive Uses a Year
The survey finds that 37.6% of gun owners have used a firearm to defend themselves, their property, a family member, or a member of their household, and it estimates that guns are used defensively in approximately 2.2 million incidents per year. In most of those incidents — 76.3% — no shot was fired. About half, 50.8%, involved more than one assailant. In 70.6%, the defensive use succeeded such that no crime remained to be reported to the police. 8.4% were directed against animal threats rather than criminal ones. Separately, 34.7% of owners report that the mere presence of a gun deterred criminal conduct.
Those figures are consistent with the defensive-gun-use literature running back through Gary Kleck’s research — the work whose findings were removed from the CDC’s website and only later restored — and through John Lott’s. They also vindicate the framing I press on everyone: the Second Amendment protects Americans against all forms of tyranny. The phrase is deliberately broad, and it should be. It reaches the rabid animal, the street predator, the cartel enforcer, the foreign invader, and the tyrannical government alike. Joseph Story and St. George Tucker each described the armed citizenry as the palladium of the liberties of a republic. Two point two million incidents a year is what that palladium looks like in practice.
Standard Capacity, by the Numbers
Seventy percent of gun owners indicate there are circumstances in which they carry a handgun for self-defense, and approximately 33.6 million — 39.3% of owners aged twenty-one and over — are public carriers who are permitted to carry and who carry at least sometimes.
On magazines: 50.5% of gun owners, approximately 44.5 million adults, currently own magazines that hold more than ten rounds, amounting to approximately 539 million such magazines, and 88.0% of those owners cite a defensive purpose for owning them. Magazine capacity is not the question presented in these two cases, but the evidence travels. When the District of Columbia Court of Appeals struck the District’s magazine ban in Benson v. United States, No. 23-CV-0541 (D.C. Ct. App. Mar. 5, 2026), it relied on English’s 2021 figures. The second wave refreshes that record for every court that follows.
What Comes Next
Justice Barrett’s concurrence in Wolford v. Lopez, No. 24-1046 (U.S. June 25, 2026), warned in footnote one against smuggling history into the plain-text step of the analysis. That maneuver is precisely how the lower courts sustained these bans, and precisely the error I have documented in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. Strip it away, put the burden where Heller and Bruen put it, and then add forty million rifles to the record. A decision should arrive by June 2027. The history of the future is yet to be written, but I like where we stand.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.