There have been over 400,000,000 guns sold in the U.S. since November 1998.
The View From North Central Idaho
Ramblings on explosives, guns, politics, and sex by a redneck Idaho farm boy who became a software engineer living near Seattle.
There have been over 400,000,000 guns sold in the U.S. since November 1998.
Sweet!
You’d think a number like that would give the grabbers cause to think for at least a moment, wouldn’t you?
Jeff B.
Leftists “think”?! HA! They can’t. All they can do is EMOTE!
ILL. Top gun saie state?
Didn’t see that coming
A lot of people have figured out that they have need in excess of the burden of state-directed inconvenience.
Sales figures do not count those that have simply sidestepped state-directed inconvenience.
Also, to my mind, state-directed inconvenience is pronounced “infringement”.
That number is way out of whack. It seems to me that I remember reading that Ill was checking CHL holders on a regular basis and I’m thinking that is skewing the statistics.
I just don’t think that state would be that far in front of the others.
Is Frum aware of this stat?
Unfortunately, none of them were used to shoot David Frum.
Unless you know of some serious criminal behaviour I don’t know about, Frum is far from deserving of that at this point.
Wrong. Frum wants to disarm us….ALL OF US. That makes him a commie…..part of the ideology that wants to ENSLAVE US then exterminat massive numbers of us. He….and every other commie needs to be killed. They and their ideology are INCOMPATIBLE with freedom. They refuse to accept or allow anyone else to think or believe anything they don’t approve of. They will not quit, they will not go away and they will not coexist. The ONLY solution to communism and it’s adherents is the same as the only solution for islam. Eradication.
NOBODY wants to admit the ugly truth. The left is AT WAR WITH US. They have been for decades. A war that if they win will see them do what EVERY OTHER COMMIE REGIME of the 20th century did….kill MILLIONS of unarmed citizens. The ONLY logical, reasonable, rational WORKING RESPONSE to that is to KILL THEM FIRST.
“In order to have enough freedom, it is necessary to have too much.” — Clarence Darrow
You don’t eliminate toxic ideologies by killing those “infected.” That is a toxic ideology borne by communism itself. So either you’re the commie or your a Fed with feelers out for extremists.
Frum has said in the past that all gun owners are cowards. He also insinuated that no Second Amendment supporters had ever served in the military. By hinting at this, he has essentially made it true. Granted that many, possibly most of them DID serve, in the chain of causality it doesn’t matter. Professional historians, overwhelmingly leftist, will follow his lead and record that no Second Amendment supporters have ever served in the military, and henceforth everything will follow as if they had not. Essentially Frum is an extremely evil parasite with a time machine. Not a literal time machine as in science fiction, but for purposes of affecting the chain of history, indistinguishable from one.
Pingback: The futility of wishing for Gun Confiscation
Some back-of-the-envelope stuff while waiting on the coffee maker……
The late and much missed Kevin O’Brien of the Weaponsman blog did a deep dive into the data back in, IIRC 2016, and estimated at that time, NICS numbers included, that America had between 440 million and 640 million guns (that’s IIRC, the Weaponsman archive is at the loose rounds blog (www.weaponsman.looserounds.com, and the search function is slow enough that I’m trusting my memory rather than invest more time finding that particular blog post). The sales data Joe linked to indicates that another ~119.5 million have been added to that for 2017 through 2020 (and, probably another ~25 million for 2021 so far (2020 was 39.7 million, but a lot of shelves were close to bare by Dec 31) but those numbers aren’t included in the “400 million” number. So, taking the Weaponsman figures and adding 2017 plus mid-2021 which is ~150 million to O’Brien’s figures brings us to ~590 to ~790 million. Split the difference and it’s about 690 million, deduct 10% for a fudge factor and it’s still well over 600 million. Yes, a lot of those are older, many are single shots, some probably don’t work, but plenty of them do. It’s reasonable to assume that everything sold since 1998 (the NICS numbers, 400 million) works just fine.
IIRC, in 2020 ammunition manufacturers made or imported 8.7 billion rounds; assuming 2021 was about the same, through August that’s another 5.8 billion so 14.5 billion in 2 years. That’s ~24 rounds per existing gun in 2 years, figure at least triple that adding in “the stuff we bought before.” ~75 rounds/gun doesn’t sound like much, but….when Hitler’s Germany told Switzerland how many men they could invade with the Swiss said “we’ll just shoot twice then go home.”
600+ million guns, probably 40+ billion rounds of ammo, 900,000 LEOs nationwide, 2.7 million total personnel in all 5 of the US armed forces…..one person, Christopher Dorner, tied 3600-officer LAPD in knots for over 2 weeks. 1/20th of 1 percent of 330 million (165,000) X Christopher Dorner = really, really bad numbers for one side. Even 1/10th of 1 percent of 2020 Trump voters is 75,000.
I doubt anyone who’s seen the targets from high power rifle at Camp Perry – or for that matter, the 300 yard version at Backwoods Gun Club in Podunk, Anywhere – would want to severely challenge the side with those numbers. There wouldn’t seem to be much profit in it.
I was wondering about that too. I’m guessing, just off the top of my head, that 50%-60% of the firearms I own were obtained before 1998.
If that’s representative it would mean about 800,000,000+ firearms exist in the USA.
400M checks don’t equal 400M guns. There are both overcounts and undercounts in that number. As someone above noted, the system is used for CCW issue. On the other hand, some states have their own system and some states allow CCW holders to bypass the system and people can buy multiple guns on the same background check. The NSSF has an adjusted count that is probably more reliable at least for new guns. Nobody knows how many used guns are bought and sold but by definition, these don’t add to the total stock.
Confiscation will be impossible. This is very comforting to me.
While this is a great thing for the people of this nation, it will end up with the order to take away our guns given by those who seek to retain power as the country destabilizes.
The funny part is that the way the system is set up. The manufacturers report the firearms and serial numbers of all guns it ships. To BATFE. So if they wanted you to know the total number of firearms built or imported in the USA. That should not be a problem.
Unless they don’t want you to know the total number. Or just as likely the ATF can’t find the total number to give to the FBI.
Either way. As mentioned by others here already. Background checks are for new and old guns that pass through an FFL’s inventory. And I’ve put 20 l firearms on one background check before. And could have put more. The real info is out there.
But I suspect they really don’t want you to feel that empowered by knowing it.
The BATFE is an agency of the national government. Data reported to it should be available somewhere. The Freedom of Information Act should be usable to pry that data from the government. I’m not sure if it’s necessary to have a case or controversy or if merely being an investigative reporter doing a story would be enough to start the process of getting that information from BATFE.
Considering how the IRS and other agencies have used regulations as weapons in Lawfare in the recent past, I would expect the full force and power of the government to fall upon anyone who requested such information.
There is no need to pry. Just go about half way down on this page and pick the year of interest: Annual Firearms Manufacturers And Export Report.
Glad someone knows how to use the inter-webs!
A quick look at their graphs shows, (very roughly), 160 million guns manufactured since 1986.
Minus exports. Plus imports and scary ghost guns.
Seeing the largest army in the world is under 2.5 million personal. I think that’s the Chinese? And most of those are in logistics.
Ya, America has the most frightening home guard the world has ever seen.
No wonder the commies want as to destroy ourselves. Any way you look at it were Yamamoto’s nightmare+++.
Don’t forget the large, and growing, number of home made guns. It’s been getting increasingly easy, and cheaper, to make one’s own receivers or frames for example, or to buy an 80% and then finish it off.
MTHead is right. The ATF should know, with a very high degree of certainty, how many firearms were manufactured commercially or imported in any given year. That is, ostensibly, their job, but then I very much doubt whether they’ve actually been doing it.
And stepping back and looking at this from a distance, why focus on gun sales at all? What aren’t we stupidly obsessing over something else, like the numbers of bananas sold?
For that matter, why should anyone in government even remotely care how many guns, or bananas, were sold in any given time period? Unless they want to interfere with people’s right to engage in commerce or any other peaceful activity, none of this would ever matter in any way whatsoever. The only scenario in which these numbers matter, ever, is one in which those in government intend to violate, or are in the process of violating, citizen’s rights.
We could consider the scenario in which our government wants to know how many well and properly armed, and fighting ready, citizens there are, exclusively for the purpose of evaluating our nation’s capability to defend against foreign attack, but…that would be a serious reason, and to even consider it as a motivating factor is rather laughable at this point.
Stepping even farther back and looking at the even bigger picture, what is the significance of guns in the hands of citizens anyway? You know they haven’t put up a significant fight over the last 100+ years during which their country’s founding principles have been systematically undermined. When was the last time justice was served to a corrupt state or local government by an organized militia? The 1940s?
Can we even define corruption anymore, without applying it each and every jurisdiction in the entire country? And so haven’t we lost already? Hasn’t the corruption become fully institutionalized, even accepted and embraced in most cases, such that being anti-corruption is being at the same time anti-government in general?
The people are demoralized to the point where even the so-called “conservatives” would be hard pressed to identify any bedrock principles, and then be willing to stick to them. They already consider compromise a virtue, and global ecumenical unity a goal. At this stage, what does it really matter how many guns we have if the plan is to effectively erase the United States? I say it’s been over 90% accomplished already.
And so whatever it is that y’all think anyone is going to actually fight for, I really could not identify it at this point. Can you? Exactly?
OK, their lives. Sure. People would fight for their very lives, but I submit to you that at such a point in the progression of the rise of Romish authoritarianism, by the time the people are shooting to save their lives the war has long, long ago been utterly lost. And of course they’d be shooting the wrong people, because those actually responsible for the evil are not even in sight. We’d only be shooting their mindless pawns.
And I’m not convinced that most people would kill even to save their skins. By that time they’ve likely lost everything else, and so what’s a few years of what remains of a miserable life in a corrupt world that’s worth fighting for?
Right, so let’s see if we can fully and consistently define what we’d be fighting for, and then of course we’d have to explain why we haven’t been fighting for it for the last 130 years or so, and what would change to make us all of a sudden start fighting for it in our currently weakened and demoralized condition.
And if we have one gun each or ten guns each, what difference could that make? And if we don’t agree on what we think is worth killing for, again, what difference are our guns going to make?
I wonder how many of those ended up lost in Tragic Boating Accidents….