Armed America

Happy New Years!

If you are reading this it means the lights are still on and society is functioning. 

A while back I was attending a gun show and one of the vendors there told a couple that the county we were in, was the most armed county in the U.S.

It got me to thinking, how would anyone come to that conclusion? Was this total number of guns or guns per capita? Where did the data come from?

There is no debating that Americans are the most armed populace in the World. According to some, Americans own more than 40% of the guns in civilian hands while only making up 5% of the World's population.

With an estimated 400 million guns in private hands our ownership rate is higher than one per person. Where did this number come from? Is it accurate?

Some have attempted to figure out which States and Counties have the highest rate of gun ownership, this not as easy.

Data like gun sales, place of origin of recovered guns in crimes and surveys do not always jive.

Let's start with the definition of a gun. Does it have to function to be counted? Does an AR-15 lower count? What about guns that have been parted out, only to be rebuilt by someone like me later? Grandpa's old rusty shotgun in the attic is a gun, but would it fire when needed?

Surveys should not be trusted either, after all, how many people tell a surveyor, a stranger or worse a government statistician that they own a gun, much less how many they own? Gun owners have been wise to not say a word when the question is brought forth by a stranger who may be a criminal or a government stooge.

Some of the surveys have the gall to list the estimated # of illicit guns in private hands.....they use the word illicit to mean illegal, but that is not always the case, the surveyor could be mistakenly including guns that were private transfers, where the transfer might have been against the law (by not going through a dealer), but neither the seller nor purchaser were barred from possessing the firearm, nor was the firearm stolen. In addition, what criminals respond to surveys and if they did, readily admit to committing a crime?

Then you have the problem of bias, so many of these researchers are leftist anti-gun retards and knowingly or unknowingly skew the data to feed their beliefs.

As far as I am concerned surveys are useless for this type of estimation. just one example: one article will cite a survey showing only 29% of households own a gun (Gallup Oct 2023) and 55% support gun control, while two months earlier another article states that more than 66% of American households have a gun (Axios Aug 2023).

Back to the data, supposedly there are roughly 400 million guns in private hands in the U.S., however since FFLs began performing instant background checks in 1998, there have been 300 million recorded firearms sales through dealers. That is just since 1998, what about the prior 100 years?

That would mean that there are or were only 100 million guns in America prior to 1998, a number I highly question. 

Another survey said that nearly 500 million guns were produced in the U.S. between 1899 and 2023, with 25 million of those being exported.

One study said that between 1986 and 2019 there were 250 million guns manufactured or imported into the United States.

We don't know if this includes the number of US made guns that returned to the US after the wars or guns that were once exported and repatriated.

Certainly, some were lost, destroyed by fire or government agencies or possibly smuggled out of the country. On the flip side hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of 80% type firearms have been constructed in the U.S. in recent years, these don't have serial numbers or records and the people building them would go out of their way to keep them secret.

What if we used concealed carry permit data? According to Fox News in November of 2023 there were over 21 million concealed carry permits issued in the U.S. The article states that this is a drop by .5% year over year, probably due to 27 states now having Constitutional Carry Laws, which allow carrying open or concealed without a permit. Again, the data doesn't give us a clear picture.

We come to the point where we have to "guesstimate" the number of guns and gun owners. 

Here is my guess, I think we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 600-700 million guns in the U.S. The number of gun owners is higher than most would think. There are approximately 25 million Americans that are under 21, incarcerated or homeless. Which leaves us with 308 million.

My estimation is that 3/4 of those 308 million own a gun which would equal around 225-million-gun owners. Many leftists do not admit to owning a gun, some do.....Kamala Harris did, Diane Feinstein did, the Pelosi household is armed.....

Assuming the 225 million number is correct, this is larger than the top 10 armies in the World combined!

Just remember statistics don't mean much (like the one that says 100% of people exposed to water will die, which is true, but very misleading as everyone will die). 

In this case it really is no one's business who owns guns and where they live. I would prefer the left and their criminal friends just assume EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE has a gun.