Despite the role that firearms have in the continent, both in the proliferation of violence and crime and the lethality of conflicts that arise daily, empirical studies of this phenomenon are still scarce and methodologically weak. This reality is not foreign to Uruguay, a society that has been categorized by international organizations among those who maintain higher proportion of weapons among civilians, in spite of that the research in this area has serious limitations. This article aims to

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... mprove knowledge about the presence of firearms in homes. For this purpose is based on a survey conducted within the framework of a research project on Access to Justice that develops in the field of Facultad de Derecho (UdelaR). In order to contextualize the situation in Uruguay, recent regional and local studies are analyzed, while are listed some methodological limitations of current surveys. The results presented allow confirm some trends of previous studies, and accumulate new evidence on the prevalence of guns in homes, as well as know some characteristics and attitudes of their owners.