Significance of police gun sales

Jersey City is attempting to get gun and ammo manufactures to help in their malicious attempts at infringing upon the specific enumerated right of the people to keep and bear arms.

But how significant is the police market? Do manufactures have a significant incentive to participate in this attempt?

Facts:

NICS checks (a proxy for private citizen gun sales):

  • 2011: 16,454,951
  • 2012: 19,592,303.

     

    Firearms in 2011:

  • Manufactured in the U.S: 6,541,886
  • Exported: 296,888
  • Imported: 4,844,590

     

    Approximate number of state and local police officers with arrest authority: (2008 appears to be the most recently available data) 800,000.

    Assumptions:

  • Police firearms include handguns, rifles, and shotguns and one firearm is purchased for each police officer every year. Resulting in each firearm being replace every three years.
  • One fourth of all law enforcement officers participate in the attempted infringement.

     

    Analysis:

    Using the given facts and assumptions the participating agencies would account for annual sales of about 200,000 firearms.

    The net new firearms supply in the U.S. is about 11,000,000 (U.S. manufactured plus imported minus exports).

    Private citizen sales, including used guns, is something on the order of 16,000,000 to 19,000,000 per year. Therefore civilian sales are a major portion of the total new firearms sales.

    The “back of the envelope” estimate is that even using the optimistic assumption that a fourth of sales to law enforcement officers would contribute to the infringement that would only account for less than 2% of all new gun sales.

    Any manufacture which considers going along with this will also give extremely serious consideration to the effect on Smith and Wesson when they collaborated with the enemy.

    Conclusion:

    Jersey City attempts to push manufactures into assisting them in their attempts to infringe upon the rights of the people to keep and bear arms will be ignored, if not actively rejected, by firearm and ammunition suppliers.

    Whoever thought up this screwball plan did not do, or is incapable of, simple arithmetic involving easily available data. But one should not be surprised. We know these people have mental problems.

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    14 thoughts on “Significance of police gun sales

    1. What about manufacturers who provide firearms to the military? Those are neither civilian nor police sales.

      I know it won’t skew the numbers enough to have any real effect, but they should be listed.

      • I didn’t run across those numbers. It may be they are deliberately suppressed.

        I was concerned about those numbers too which is why I included the NICS numbers. Those numbers indicate that private citizens purchase, including used guns, more than the entire new manufacture supply.

        And even if the military sales were a significant portion of the total until they demand the sellers be PC instead of providing the best product those sales end up being on “our side” of the “balance sheet”.

        • Any weapons sold to the military are never included in openly published .gov documents. That information is classified, possibly only at ‘Confidential’, but still withheld from public perview for obvious military necessity.

          It certainly would help any possible adversary to know how many weapons are procured each year.

          • Not true — small arms procurement numbers are open bid contracts.

            And they aren’t that big, because Uncle Sam expects to get a MINIMUM of 10 years (more usually 20, and frequently longer — note that NO service grade 1911s were procured from 1945 until very recently. . . )

            Ammo is a different story — the military does use a lot of ammo. But again, open bid contracts.

    2. Now, waidaminit, Joe. Our good friends at [insert anti-gun group] (who would never, ever lie to us) say that gun ownership is declining to record lows, and that the people doing most of the buying are people who already own guns. No person can use more than one (maybe two, if they’re both handguns) gun at a time. So when confiscation time comes, the police will only have to “deal with” (read: arrest/murder with extreme prejudice) a few violent right-wing Insurrectionists who have more guns than they need or can use.

      Plus the military has machine-guns/APCs/drones/tanks/jets/helicopters/nukes/torpedoes/shoulder-things-that-go-up/heat-seeking-bullets-that-cook-stuff/etc. that they’ll use if Our Glorious President gives His Divine Order. Those bitter-clingers/traitors/insurrections/seditionists/etc. don’t have a chance! Then the manufacturers and suppliers will HAVE to deal with the government, and ONLY the government, as it should be. They should make friends with Jersey City now, while they still can.

      [BTW, in case it wasn’t dripping enough, read this whole comment as if it’s enclosed in [sarcasm] tags. 😉 ]

    3. My initial reaction on reading the ‘survey’ NJ want’s Mfgr’s. to complete for consideration was a faint recollection of some anti-gun-east-coast-state (NJ in fact IIRC) having passed some law making bio-metrically secured guns the ONLY option legally available to the public once the technology reaches the market…and that there are a few, very small, manufacturers who HAVE biometric guns they want to sell, but neither the public nor rank-n-file officers want them, owing to their functional limitations. Also, they are openly candid about their desire for police to be the ‘only ones’ with a gun that can’t be taken and used against them (IE: they are actively marketing to police agencies, no intention to sell to the lowly plebes.)

      Should one of these smaller manufacturers manage to secure a NJ contract for their biometric guns, then *whammo!*…they now have a lock on all handgun sales in NJ since the law would then ‘kick in’ and every other (new) non-biometric gun would be illegal to sell. NJ get’s their wet-dream handgun ‘ban’ (because no knowledgeable gun owner would purchase one of those pulsing balls of suck-n-fail), and a small (politically correct) manufacturer get’s their foot in the industry door…that’s been busted open for them by The State.

      Of course.. that Biometric gun law runs afoul of the SCOTUS ‘In Common Use’ ruling, but still…I wouldn’t put it past some politico to have come up with this ‘survey’ for just this reason.

      • Police unions will kill any attempt to shove biometric guns down police throats in ANY department, for the same reason they killed any attempt to apply the biometric laws to cops at all — and if the unions backed down, individual officers would resist.

        No cop is willing to be dealing with a 404 error or Blue Screen of Death on his sidearm while facing a gangbanger with an “old fashioned” Glock or Taurus. I don’t blame them, either — _I’m_ not willing to risk that either. Even at 99.99% reliability for false negatives (which is a drug addled DREAM in biometrics), that’s still too risky.

        • Biometric identification for defensive gun use is especially difficult. It’s incredibly time sensitive and must be tolerant of gloves, sweat, mud, and blood.

          My semi-professional opinion is that it will never be practical.

          • As a military systems engineer, I will _never_ propose or support a biometric lockouts on ANY weapons or warfare system. It’s not even reliable enough for my personal tablet or laptops.

          • Reliable enough, hell. just trying to agree in philosophical principle on failure mode (shoot or no-shoot?) stops it before it begins.
            FWIW, “smart guns” make an appearance at the end of The Stars Came Back.

    4. One gun per year per cop is a pretty high estimate.

      But then there is the current trend of supplying cop shops with military equipment.

      Then there is a limit to the number of gun makers supplying guns to the military, and so only a few would care at all about military sales.

      Cops tend to use civilian model handguns and shotguns, and many of their carbines are civi type too.

      It gets complicated, but in the final analysis we vastly outnumber the total .gov.

      As Glenn Beck said; “They don’t surround us. We surround them.”

      But I reject the premise of the assertion that gun makers are part of some crime problem, so all of this sales data stuff is academic, i.e. worthless. Jersey City is saying that they can’t enforce their idiotic, anti American laws, and so then somehow their crime problems must be those eeevil gun makers’ fault.

      Fuck that. Those people are impostors. They need to be dragged out of office kicking and screaming, and put in the slammer ’till they wise up.

    5. Pingback: SayUncle » Significance of police gun sales

    6. And, LE sales are typically at a lower profit margin than civilian retail sales.

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