19 Million Americans Have Thought About Shooting Someone

More than 19 million adults in the United States have, at some point in their lives, seriously thought about shooting another person. That is not a projection or a worst-case modelling exercise. It is the prevalence figure from a nationally representative survey of over 7,000 people, conducted in 2025 by researchers at the University of Michigan. Nineteen million. And in the past year alone, the number was closer to 8.7 million, or roughly one in every 30 adults.

You might expect Brian Hicks to find this alarming. He does, in a way. But Hicks, a psychologist and professor of psychiatry at the U-M Medical School who led the study, also thinks the number opens a door.

The research, published in JAMA Network Open, is one of the first serious attempts to characterise this population at a national scale: who they are, what they were thinking, and crucially, what happened next. Most of the time, nothing happened. The vast majority of people who have ever thought about shooting someone never acted on the thought and never will. That is perhaps not surprising. What is perhaps more useful is what the survey revealed about the moments when things might have gone differently, and what, if anything, was there to catch them.

Prevention, it turns out, may hinge on two underappreciated things: conversation and proximity to a firearm.

Among those who had thought of shooting someone, roughly one in five had told someone else about it. That might sound like a confession on the edge of catastrophe. In public health terms, it is something closer to an opportunity. In 21 states, so-called extreme risk protection orders, often called red flag laws, allow courts to temporarily remove firearms from people identified as being at high risk of harming themselves or others. If a friend, family member, or colleague hears something that frightens them, that legal mechanism exists precisely for moments like this. The catch is that it requires someone to act on what they heard.

The firearm access question is similarly layered. About 8% of those with thoughts of shooting someone had, at some point, brought a gun to a specific location with the intention of using it. That figure corresponds to roughly 1.5 million people. But among respondents who had never owned a gun, about 21% said they had thought about acquiring one specifically to carry out their thoughts. That is a distinct population, and one that current interventions largely aren’t designed for; waiting periods and background checks, which have been shown to reduce impulsive violence, aren’t triggered until the point of purchase, which may be too late for some and, for others, is never reached at all.

“While most people who have these thoughts don’t act on them,” Hicks said, “the number is so high that the small proportion who do act turns into tens of thousands of fatal and nonfatal firearm injuries each year.”

The demographics of the group are consistent, in several ways, with what researchers already know about firearm violence more broadly. Men were considerably more likely than women to report having had these thoughts, as were younger people and those with lower household incomes. Black Americans were about twice as likely as white Americans to report thoughts of shooting someone, a disparity the researchers link to the well-documented disparity in homicide victimisation: Black Americans are six times more likely than white Americans to be killed by a gun. Living in a city and living in the Midwest were also associated with elevated rates.

What the survey did not find was perhaps equally notable. Gun owners were no more likely than non-owners to have had these thoughts. Nor did political affiliation show any significant relationship. Republicans, Democrats, and independents reported similar rates of homicidal ideation. The intuition that such thoughts belong to one group or another doesn’t hold up under scrutiny; they’re distributed more broadly than most people assume.

The targets people had in mind were revealing. About half named an enemy, meaning someone with whom they had a pre-existing conflict. About a quarter named a stranger. Fourteen percent named a government official or employee, a figure that Hicks and his co-author, Mark Ilgen, describe as consistent with patterns of politically motivated violence. Family members, current and former romantic partners, coworkers, and classmates all appeared further down the list.

The survey is part of a larger ongoing project called the National Firearms, Alcohol, Cannabis, and Suicide Survey, which will eventually examine how mental health, substance use, and other factors interact with firearm behaviour. This first paper is deliberately descriptive: here is the shape of the problem, here is who it affects, here are the points where something might be done. Future analyses may sharpen those points considerably.

The sobering implication is that homicidal ideation sits somewhere on a continuum with homicidal action, and the distance between them isn’t fixed. It probably varies by access to a weapon, by the quality of social connections, by whether anyone asked the right question at the right time. What the University of Michigan study adds, for the first time at this scale, is a clearer sense of where people are on that continuum and what might move them, or stop them, from travelling further along it.

DOI / Source: https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2026.0734

Frequently Asked Questions

How many Americans have seriously thought about shooting someone? A nationally representative survey published in JAMA Network Open found that about 7.3% of US adults, equating to more than 19 million people, have thought about shooting someone at some point in their lives. In the past year alone, around 3.3% of adults, or roughly 8.7 million people, reported such thoughts.

Does owning a gun make someone more likely to have violent thoughts? The study found no significant relationship between gun ownership and thoughts of shooting others. Firearm owners were no more likely than non-owners to report homicidal ideation, which suggests that the pool of people at potential risk extends well beyond those who already have access to weapons.

What can actually reduce the risk that someone acts on these thoughts? The researchers point to two main opportunities: social disclosure and firearm access. About one in five people who had these thoughts told someone else, which creates a potential opening for intervention, especially in states with red flag laws that allow courts to temporarily remove guns from high-risk individuals. Background checks and waiting periods at the point of firearm purchase may also reduce impulsive violence.

Who is most likely to report thoughts of shooting someone? The study found elevated rates among men, younger adults, people with lower household incomes, Black Americans, urban residents, and those living in Midwestern states. Political affiliation showed no significant association with these thoughts.

What happened to people who had these thoughts? Most did nothing. The overwhelming majority of the roughly 19 million Americans who have had thoughts of shooting someone never acted on them. A small subset, estimated at around 1.5 million people, had brought a firearm to a specific location with the intent to shoot. The gap between thought and action is where prevention efforts are most likely to be effective, according to the researchers.