[tmoore912]

What If I Told You That There Were 600 MILLION Guns In The United States?

http://bearingarms.com/bob-o/2016/10/25/told-600-million-guns-united-states/

You really need to go to the source of the article and read what he has to say about the numbers here: http://weaponsman.com/?p=33875

What if we told you that one ATF computer system logged, by serial number, 252,000,000 unique firearms, and represented only those firearms manufactured, imported or sold by a relatively small number of the nation’s tens of thousands of Federal Firearms Licensees?

ATF maintains a system, introduced in 1999, called Access 2000 or A2K (GAO report; details are in the .pdfs linked at that .html link). This system allows voluntarily participating manufacturers, importers and wholesalers (no retailers) to enter their firearms by the identifying data that goes on a 4473 directly into an ATF computer. The firms can’t see the data on this system, they can only feed it in. This system is then used by the National Tracing Center in West Virginia to respond rapidly to trace requests: given serial number, make and model they can produce an instant hit, saving field agents a trip to the manufacturer, wholesaler, or jobber. Sometimes this hit can instantly tell the trace technician what retailer was the firearm’s point of first retail sale, really expediting the trace.

The participants in A2K include, as of fall, 2015, 35 firms representing 66 FFLs total.

Because some of the participants are wholesalers, some firearms manufactured by non-participating manufacturers are included, in addition to all the firearms made by participants.

For legal reasons, A2K is kept separate from all other agency computer systems, and while it is on the public internet for maintenance purposes, it has no direct connection to any other ATF database.

As of 2 October, 2015, the data in A2K included 252,433,229 records, representing one firearm each. That means that at least those 250 million firearms have been manufactured, or imported, or sold at wholesale in approximately 15 years. (Duplicate records, say from a manufacturer or importer in 2000 a jobber as a used gun in 2007, don’t increment the count; the unique serial number ties those data points together as a single “recordâ€).

For the total count of firearms in the USA to be 300 million, the following must be true:

 

[ber950]

I suspect the number is closer to 1 Billion. That article uses very conservative numbers.

 

[moe mensale]

That 300 million number has been around for so long and yet we read articles of ever increasing firearms production and huge increases in the monthly NICS checks figures for years. But the totals never materially changed. Could be related to the narrative that gun ownership and gun owners are on the decline. Good article. There's lots of guns out there!

 

[tmoore912]

Report: Nearly 400 Million Civilian-Owned Guns in America
Civilians own 100 times as many guns as the military, 400 times as many as police

http://freebeacon.com/culture/report-nearly-400-million-civilian-owned-guns-america/

The Small Arms Survey estimates there are 393,300,000 civilian-owned firearms in the United States. The survey, performed by the Graduate Institute of Geneva, estimated the United States military has about 4.5 million firearms. It put the number of firearms owned by police throughout the United States at just over 1 million.

That means American civilians own nearly 100 times as many firearms as the U.S. military and nearly 400 times as many as law enforcement.

 

[UtiPossidetis]

But I thought you fellows owned some weapons too? BTW, if 326 million people are in the US then there are roughly 163 million guns. How many weapons is still up for debate.