The 2026 National Firearms Survey claims 36 million Americans hunt every year. The federal government counts 14 million. The gap is 21 million mystery people, and that gap now sits unexplained in front of the Supreme Court.
William English of Georgetown posted the second wave of his survey to SSRN on August 24. Eleven days later, on September 4, he filed an amicus brief in his own name, with the Center for Human Liberty, in Viramontes v. Cook County and Grant v. Higgins, telling the Court his unreviewed working paper “warrants reliance” as proof that AR-15 type rifles are in common use for lawful purposes. Page 9 of the brief lists those purposes. Hunting sits third, at 50.2 percent of owners, behind home defense and target shooting.
I’m a bit perplexed at how little data integrity there is in this whole system.
The raw data is on Harvard Dataverse. I downloaded it and ran the numbers. Every headline figure in the paper reproduces exactly: 16,688 validated owners, 30.0 percent owning an AR-15 or similar rifle, 50.2 percent of those citing hunting. The math is simple, and the problem is what it’s being used falsely to imply.
16 million AR-15 hunters, 14 million hunters
The survey asks every validated gun owner whether they go hunting at least once in a typical year. 40.8 percent say yes. The paper puts the adult gun-owning population at 88 million. Multiply those and the survey implies 35.9 million annual hunters in the United States, roughly one adult in seven.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service runs the National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation every five years, since 1955. The 2022 wave drew over 100,000 respondents and counted 14.4 million hunters aged 16 and over, six percent of the population. It counts anyone who hunted, licensed or unlicensed, on public land or private, with a rifle or a bow. It is the benchmark every state wildlife agency and every hunting organisation in the country uses.
English’s survey question anticipates there will be a license objection. Its wording very clearly invites respondents to “count hunting on private land, which may not require a hunting license.” The federal survey already does also, however. The 2.5x gap isn’t explained by the caveat.
Then look at the AR-15 subsample. 63.8 percent of AR-15 and similar-rifle owners say they hunt every year. Applied to the paper’s 26.4 million owners, that is 16.9 million AR-15 owners hunting annually. The entire American hunting population, by the federal count, is 14.4 million. The survey’s AR-15 owners alone outnumber it by two and a half million.
Look at this the other way now. Among respondents who say they hunt every year, 47 percent own an AR-15 or similar rifle. Half of America’s hunters owning a pistol-grip semiautomatic is a claim anyone who has stood in a check station line can weigh against what actually comes through it.
Overcount explained
Self-reported hunting has a hard external check, because the federal government has measured it for seventy years. Against that check, the gun owners in this sample overstate by a factor of two and a half. The same respondents, in the same sitting, supplied the defensive gun use figures and the rifle and magazine counts that the brief carries to the Court. Those rest on self-report alone. The one variable that can be measured with an outside benchmark fails it.
The data offers other insights about who was answering. Among the 5,001 AR-15 owners with complete counts, 23.1 percent entered more AR-15 type rifles than total rifles owned. Individual respondents reported owning 5,678, 1,513, 1,332, and 1,000 AR-15s. The paper drops those counts from the stock estimate and keeps the respondents as owners for the 30 percent prevalence figure. Median completion time for the full owner questionnaire, including itemised magazine counts by capacity and narrative defensive incident questions, was five minutes. Nearly half finished in under five.
The ownership question itself opens with “Some have argued that few gun owners actually want or use” these rifles, before asking whether the respondent owns one. That is a leading stem, and the paper prints it as a methodological refinement. The instruction that follows tells owners to include rifles “modified or moved to be compliant with local law.” A California featureless rifle is legal precisely because the statute defines it as something other than an assault weapon. The survey counts it as one, and the note under Table 8 adds rifles kept in other states to the tally, which is how California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Maryland all land near the 30 percent national figure despite bans. The brief then spends three pages accusing a rival study of a “demonstrable coding error.”
The same respondents, on self-defense
The leading stem is a troubling pattern. The AR-15 question opens with “Some have argued that few gun owners actually want or use” them. The magazine question opens with the identical clause. The defensive gun use question opens with “Many policymakers recognize that a large number of people participate in shooting sports but question how often guns are used for self-defense.” The deterrence question hands the respondent an example before asking, a landowner with a rifle on his shoulder turning away a trespasser.
Every contested number in the brief comes from a question that first told the respondent who was arguing against them. That’s not subtle.
The defensive gun use estimate of 2.2 million per year reproduces from the data. It comes from dividing every incident a respondent ever reported by the adult years the respondent has lived, then multiplying by 88 million owners. That method assumes a rate that holds across a lifetime.
The data says that’s wrong.
Gun owners aged 18 to 20 report 0.47 defensive uses per adult year, roughly one every two years. Owners aged 26 to 30 report 0.09. Owners over 80, who lived their prime years through the 1970s, 80s and 90s when the FBI violent crime rate ran well above today’s, report 0.002. The rate falls in every single bracket from 18 to 80, by a factor of 200 end to end. Lifetime incident counts should rise with age, since a longer life offers more chances. Here they peak at 26 to 30 and fall to almost nothing.
The paper calls this “concentrated in early adulthood.” The easier explanation is that the youngest respondents in an online panel say yes the most.
Yes, there are yes clusters.
Respondents who own an AR-15, own a magazine over ten rounds, and hunt every year report a lifetime defensive gun use at 64.6 percent. Respondents with none of the three report it at 20.8 percent. 1,239 validated owners said yes to all five contested items in the survey: the rifle, the magazine, the hunting, the defensive use, and the deterrence. Owning a rifle that also gets used for deer makes a gun no better in a fight. It makes a respondent more likely to say yes. The defensive use rate tracks the person answering, and the survey has no way to tell the two apart.
Then look at the gunfire. 23.7 percent of reported incidents involved firing the gun, with a median of two rounds. At the paper’s own 2.2 million annual figure that is 521,000 defensive shootings a year, over a million rounds fired at people or animals in self-defense. One respondent reported firing a million rounds in a single incident, two more reported 500.
A million rounds.
The FBI’s justifiable homicide data for 2015 through 2024 records 2,776 killings by private citizens across the whole decade, 88.5 percent with a firearm. That is about 246 a year. One attacker killed for every 2,100 defensive shootings. 53.3 percent of the incidents took place outside the home but on the respondent’s property, and 8.4 percent were against animals.
The brief tells the Court that 70.6 percent of defensive uses were so successful there was no crime to report. The FBI figure suggests a far simpler reading of why nothing was reported.
Built for the brief
The Azrael, Blocher, Cook, Hemenway and Miller critique of the 2021 wave took three years to reach print in the SMU Law Review. By then the first paper had been cited in roughly sixty-five briefs and at Supreme Court oral argument. The second wave reached the Court in eleven days, carried by its own author, with the survey firm named as a data-quality credential and The Trace’s funders named in a footnote on the same page where the brief borrows The Trace’s numbers.
The 40.8 percent hunting rate appears nowhere in the body of the paper. It sits in one row of an appendix table on page 69. The body text on page 41 says instead that “half report using them for hunting.” Respondents ticked “Hunting” from a list of reasons for owning the rifle. The paper turned a ticked box into use, and the brief carried the upgraded version to the Court.
Page 5 says the survey “was sponsored and paid for by a grant from the Wealth of Nations Institute.” The Wealth of Nations Institute is a Delaware nonprofit with an IRS ruling year of 2024, a Kennett Pike mail-drop address in Wilmington, and a single public filing reporting under fifty thousand dollars in program spending. A 51,398-respondent Centiment panel costs more than that. Whose money came through that vehicle is unstated. The PDF’s own metadata lists its creator as OpenAI Prism, with a creation date of August 26, two days after the date on the title page.
Harry Frankfurt defined bullshit as speech produced with indifference to whether it is true. The purpose it serves sits downstream of the speaker, and here the downstream is a docket.
The 2026 National Firearms Survey answers a question a court asked. It reports that half of American hunters own an AR-15 and that AR-15 owners alone outnumber every hunter the federal government can find. That is some real bullshit in the Supreme Court’s docket. The test was easy, so I’m guessing it’s not being done for a reason.
