Both Say Uncle and Joe Huffman point to Alan Korwin questioning just how many firearms there are in America:
The lamestream media has been claiming for years and years there are about 200 million guns in America. With about 100 million sold in just the past decade, even the brain dead can tell the media is just parroting a number without doing any research. At the very least, they should up the numbers from time to time, no?
I guess it is time for me to weigh in with my guestimations, and, coincidentally, I seem to recall running some numbers about this kind of thing not too long ago.
So, if we use our previously-agreed-upon (hey, I can agree with myself) staring point of the Small Arms Survey of 2003, in 2003 there were approximately 238,000,000 firearms in America. Then, using the numbers that the BATFE so kindly provides us, as well as the numbers from the Shooting Industry Magazine’s U.S. Firearm Industry Report (Extended) when the BATFE numbers run out, one can clearly see that there were approximately 200,000,000 firearms in America somewhere in the 1993 to 1994 period. So the media is only about 15 years out of date. Not too bad, eh?
On the flip side, using the BATFE’s numbers again, at the end of 2007, there should have been just over 250,000,000 firearms in America. Using a simple linear trendline (since the growth of the firearm population in America is very nearly linear in reality), one can project that, as of today, there are over 255,000,000 firearms in America. That number is based on the assumption that the 2003 Small Arms Survey is accurate, and the assumption that the BATFE’s books are accurate (I am not sure which assumption is the more tenuous), but as long as you are willing to accept those numbers, the outcome leaves you with over 255 million firearms in America. Personally, given the tendency firearm-owners have to underreport the number of fireams in their homes, I would bet we are a few million over even that.
Sadly, that is shy of the 1:1 ratio of firearms-to-people that Joe wants (more like 0.84:1), but it certainly goes to show how erroneous the mainstream media is on a daily basis. And this is all just based on math I threw together while watching an episode of Heroes… If the media cannot be bothered to even put forward that much effort, then what the hell are they doing?
Well that 0.84:1 ratio doesn’t include people like Paul Helmke et al who probably has a few of his own, given that he makes his living reading gun crime statistics, and knows before he layers on the lies he and his family are better off WITH guns than without them, also he might have a pre-ban collection just in case any good luck should fall on him. Of course for professonal reasons such people would answer “Zero” for the survey sake.
And of course we need to factor in people like MikeB, Cliff Lyon, Guy Cabot, Kelli, et al who really shouldn’t be trusted around guns, nor should they be allowed exception to their policy choices even given a dangerous crisis.
And of course we need to factor in violent criminals, young children, mentally ill and retarded, those who are severely disabled, who cannot or should not handle a firearm (Stephen Hawking is a great guy, but I doubt he could do much with a small .22, let alone an AR)
So honestly I think the numbers are pretty darn good.
Also let’s face it, most SHTF scenarios involve a good chunk of people dying right off the bat…
Linoge,
Correct me if I’m wrong but I think the ATF numbers include firearms that go to the police and military as well as private citizens. I”m primarily interested in firearms in private hands…
And did you take into account imports and exports?
The NICS checks are only for private citizen sales but don’t give us numbers of a lot of sales because in many states if you have a concealed weapons permit you don’t need a NICS check. And a NICS check doesn’t tell you if more than one gun was sold in that one transaction.
You might want to have a look at this article:
http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSL28348938
-US Most armed country with 90 guns per 100 people
“U.S. citizens own 270 million of the world’s 875 million known firearms, according to the Small Arms Survey 2007 by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies.”
Weer’d: True enough – once you factor out criminals and others who are legally barred from having firearms, children too young to use them responsibly, honest pacifists, dishonest victimhood-inducing pacifists (like MikeB et al), and the infirm, we are probably well within the 1:1 range. And then once you factor out first-wave victims of whatever situation we are talking about, the numbers will probably get better than that (assuming said SHTF situation does not involve wholesale physical destruction of major metropolitian areas (i.e. nuclear blasts), since you would be losing firearms in addition to people at that point). Still, though, as one commenter over at Joe’s pointed out, the ideal for any kind of zombie situation would actually be something like 4:1 – a shotgun, a rifle, and two pistols per person. Of course, I would really love to throw a crew-served something into the mix as well, but us lowly citizens are not allowed…
. And, all this said, it just continues to prove how wrong the media’s representations of the numbers really are.
Joe: Honestly, I have no idea whether or not the BATFE numbers account for all firearms, or firearms only going into civilian hands. I ask out of ignorance, but are military/LEO-intended firearms registered with the BATFE in the same manner as civilian ones? Certainly select-fire weapons do not count in this mix, given that they are no longer fit for our consumption…
As for imports and exports, the latter is counted separately by the BATFE, so it was not factored into my numbers. The former is oddly not counted by the BATFE (at least not on that webpage I linked to), but the Shooting Industry Magazine’s webpage seems to indicate that about 2 million or so are imported a year (for the past two years), so that would put us north of 260 million, and possibly even in the 280-290 range (depending on how that particular line trends over the past 15 years, and I have no information on that).
I have been trying to avoid using NICS checks, for just the reasons you bring up – they are great indicators of the status of the firearm market, but tell us nothing as to the number of individual people buying, nor the number of firearms bought.
All said, I feel comfortable in saying that the number of firearms currently in American citizens’ hands is somewhere between 250,000,000 and 300,000,000, with even more possible based on underreporting in surveys. I certainly wish the numbers were higher, but we are working on it
Shane: Or there is that. Amusingly, that does not mesh up, at all, with their 2003 Small Arms Report, once one factors in the BATFE numbers, especially if the BATFE numbers include military/LEO firearms. Furthermore, the political climate has declined such that I am willing to wager more people underreported their “armory” by more in 2007 than they did in 2003. Oy. I doubt we are ever going to get anything even approximating a solid number.
Firearms aren’t “registered” with the ATF.
The way I read the web page those are the reported numbers of guns manufactured. I presume that comes from the tax data. It would therefore seem to include LEO but probably would exclude the military.
But that is mostly speculation on my part.
Apologies, bad word choice.
I suppose I could always email them and ask. Might make things easier…