Number of guns per capita by country

This is a list of countries by guns per capita (number of privately owned small firearms divided by number of residents).

The numbers are based on the average of figures provided by the Small Arms Survey, in the Small Arms Survey 2007, unless other sources are provided, and are an estimation based on dividing the total number of known civilian-owned guns in a country by the total population of that country. As some people may possess multiple firearms, this number does not necessarily represent the percentage of people who possess guns in each country.

The ownership rate reported is the average estimate taken from "The largest civilian firearms arsenals for 178 countries. That table gives also the minimum and maximum estimates. Note that for some countries, this margin of error is considerable. For example, Yemen, ranked near the top with an ownership rate of 54.8, has a low estimate of 28.6 and a high estimate of 81.1. While the United States is ranked for the highest gun ownership rate unambiguously, Yemen based on the margin of error may rank anywhere between 2nd and 18th, Switzerland anywhere between 2nd and 16th.

The lowest gun ownership rate among the 178 countries surveyed as of 2007 was reported from Tunisia, with 0.1 (or a total number of 9,000 guns), due to very strict gun control under the Ben Ali regime (compare the rates of the neighboring states, Algeria: 7.6, Libya: 15.5).