I’ve often wondered how many rounds per year of ammo we go through in the U.S. Some say about nine billion others say about five billion as of 1992. Some say the world wide production is only 14 billion. Yet CCI (Lewiston Idaho) says they alone are going to produce more than six billion this year.
Six billion bullets in one year from just one company. Do you want to compute the odds on how safe bullets are compared to cars, swimming pools, and ladders? It’s beyond astronomical, it’s governmental*.
*I think it was one of the recent Vicious Circle podcasts that made mention of this joke.
5-9 billion rounds fired each year and only 100,000 or so killed?
So much for guns being “designed only to kill”.
9 billion rounds excluding rimfire, and military production; manufactured in the U.S. in 2006, according to SAAMI. Defense industry daily has reported that we are using approximately 4 billion rounds of ammunition for the military annually, but only manufacturing 2.7 billion rounds domestically; the rest being made up from foreign contracts, and drawdown of existing stores.
I remember the numbers, because I wrote an article about it a couple years back.
They didn’t collect data on exactly how much rimfire had been manufactured, only how many cases. On a case per case basis, they manufactured twice as many cases as all centerfire; and rimfire cases have a lot more rounds (5000 rounds of .22lr in most cases, vs 500 or 1000rounds of most centerfire ammo per case).
CCIs numbers probably include rimfire, and any military production (though I don’t think CCI has any current contracts for assembled ammo… they are a contractor for components however).