By Nate Silver, Five Thirty Eight @ nytimes.com, Dec. 18, 2012

An American child grows up in a married household in the suburbs [....] about 40 percent of such households reported having a gun in their home, according to the exit poll conducted during the 2008 presidential election [....]

[....] In 1973, about 55 percent of Republicans reported having a gun in their household against 45 percent of Democrats, according to the General Social Survey, a biennial poll of American adults.

Gun ownership has declined over the past 40 years — but almost all the decrease has come from Democrats. By 2010, according to the General Social Survey, the gun ownership rate among adults that identified as Democratic had fallen to 22 percent. But it remained at about 50 percent among Republican adults [....]

[....] the differences are most apparent in suburban areas. There, 58 percent of Republican voters said there was a gun in their household, against just 27 percent of Democrats.

Having school-aged children in the household did not significantly affect gun ownership rates, either positively or negatively. The majority of children to Republican-voting parents had a gun somewhere in their homes, while only about one in four children in Democratic-voting households did. What Democratic parents might view as a safety hazard, Republicans may see as providing their families with an extra measure of protection.

In other respects, the profile of gun owners defies some of the stereotypes that urban liberals might assign to them. For example, despite President Obama’s comments in 2008 about voters who “cling to guns and religion,” the two qualities are not strongly related to each other [....]