Carapic, Jovana. 2014 ‘Estimates of Household Firearm Ownership.’ Handgun Ownership and Armed Violence in the Western Balkans; Issue Brief No. 4, pp. 7-8. Geneva: Small Arms Survey, the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva. 1 September

Relevant contents

Estimates of Household Firearm Ownership…

On the basis of responses to the question, 'Do you, or does anyone else in your household,own a handgun?'… (1)
[A]pproximately 7.55 per cent of households in the Western Balkans owned at least one firearm.

On the basis of the responses to the question, 'How widespread would you say handgun ownership is in the town or area where you live? How many households have handguns?'- which is taken as an indirect measure of ownership- it can be estimated that the proportion of households that own handguns is nearly three times as great, at about 23.1 per cent…

[T]he number of households that own firearms in the Western Balkans can be estimated to be between about 530,000 and 1.62 million…

Self-Reported Handgun Ownership

When asked the question 'Do you, or does anyone else in your household,own a handgun?', about 6.8 per cent of all respondents attested to owning a firearm. This is nearly 2 percentage points higher than the proportion of individuals reporting handgun ownership in the European Union (European Commission, 2013, p. 6)…

Serbia and Montenegro have by far the highest self-reported ownership rate: 11.9 and 11.8 per cent of household respondents confirming that they own handguns, respectively. Indeed, the reported number of handgun owners in both countries was about double that of Albania (6.5%) and Macedonia (5.7%), triple the ownership rate of Croatia (4.3%) and Bosnia and Herzegovina (4.6%), and nearly four times higher than in Kosovo (2.9%) (see Table 4)…

Note:
(1) The exact wording of the question relating to direct handgun ownership was: Do you, or does anyone else in your household, own a handgun? Possible responses were:
1. Yes;
2. No;
8. Don't know; or
9. Refuse to answer

Source Cited:
European Commission. 2013. 'Firearms in the European Union.' Flash Eurobarometer 383.
Brussels: European Commission

Last accessed at:
http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/