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The actual figure really is innately unknowable. You can legally build an AR-15 rifle at home with a wee bit of mechanical skill and a router. However, for the sake of discussion, let’s pin that number at 30 million.
A fixed-stock AR-15 is 39 inches long. An M4 carbine with a 16-inch barrel is 33 inches long with the stock collapsed. Let’s therefore establish an average length for an AR-15 as 36 inches. If the typical “assault weapon,” whatever that truly is, spans 36 inches and you arrayed every one of them muzzle to butt, that line of guns would stretch from Boston to Los Angeles 6.5 times. That’s 17,045 miles’ worth of weapons. Starting to appreciate the scope of this thing?
There are around 400 million firearms in the U.S. A Glock 19 is 7.3 inches long. That M4 was 33. Some pistols are shorter. Some rifles are longer. Let’s just guess that they average around 20 inches across the board. Place every gun in America end-to-end, and now you have an unbroken line of weapons that will circle the globe five times.
There are 77 million lawful gun owners in the U.S. That’s 2.5 times as many Americans packing heat as there are soldiers on Planet Earth. We are some seriously well-armed rednecks.
After the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, the Australian government outlawed most guns, confiscating some 650,000 firearms. Gun control enthusiasts often look lustfully at our friends Down Under as role models. Even in a slow year, we gun-crazy Yanks buy that many new firearms every two weeks.
Will Dabbs
September 15, 2025
Gun Math is Hard | Field Ethos
Although the numbers above might seem definitive to gun owners, I’m not so sure it will have the desired effect on anti-gun people. I have often said gun grabbers don’t even understand arithmetic and some don’t even understand numbers. And with that blindness they may just double down. They may view this as all the more justification in saying, “There are too many guns on the streets.”
Ok if that number constitutes “too many,” how many is “enough?” How many is “not enough?” What is the “correct” number?
The only ‘correct number’ for the grabbers is ‘zero (0)’ in the hands of anyone but .Gov; which is strange, as for right now, .Gov is the Fascist Bad Guy™.
I often ask a similar question to my climate fanatic friends.
“Ok, if our current planet average temperature is “too high,” what average temperature would be “right?” What temperature would be “too low?” What is the “correct” temperature?”
No one ever given a satisfactory answer.
Dr. Dabbs asks a leading question at the end which we already know the answer to. These nosey, busybody, grabbers, who want to tell everyone how to live and what rights they can exercise, don’t care about much of anything but the political power they can wield to immanentize that eschaton, if just us ignorant savages would get out of their way.
They well understand that “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” and simply hate the fact that their enemies – us – retain and maintain the means to tell them to Go To Hell and make it stick.
Unfortunately, futile causes are a mainstay of the communist mindset.
Plan accordingly.
P.S. Perhaps a better question is to ask how long a grave one would need to bury communism?
“There are around 400 million firearms in the U.S.A.”
That number is woefully out of date. It was estimated at 393 million in the early 1990s. Estimates are 2.5 to 3x that many privately owned firearms in America now.
Add in the 3D2A print revolution, and there’s no way of knowing actually how many guns even exist in America.