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Paladin wrote: ↑Wed Feb 09, 2022 10:42 am

Rafe wrote: ↑Tue Feb 08, 2022 12:27 pm The local plus import total for 2000 through 2019, then, would be about 215,418,585 newly manufactured firearms entering the marketplace, or about 10.77 million each year on average for the past 20 years.

That is a lot of guns!! I wouldn't be shocked if there were over 500 million guns in the US. Certainly the NICS checks show a whole lot more guns are being sold than produced, and the NICS checks don't apply to all transactions.

Yeppers. I personally think NICS checks is a trailing indicator of general interest in owning firearms rather than any indication about the number in people's hands. You've got all the dealer-handled transfers and such in there but--and one of you FFLs should correct me--even though we have to fill-out a 4473 for a purchase from a dealer, with a CHL/LTC I don't believe it ever hits the system as an NICS check; other states have similar license perks. If correct, there's probably some offsetting of those numbers going on. And I really thought 2021's November and December would nudge us over into a new annual NICS record total, but we didn't quite make it.

I honestly think 500 million firearms in civilian hands is quite realistic, maybe even a tad low. I mean, a decently maintained firearm will last for decades. Glock started selling handguns in 1988 (seems a lot more recent than that, but that's just because I'm getting older), and unless destroyed every single one of those should still be running; and even M1 Garands manufactured in the late '30s are still in use and changing hands. No batteries required. That's one of the very basic appeals of firearms to me: so much stuff we use in our daily lives today needs external energy to run and typically has a limited lifespan. Guns are old-school mechanical: you take care of them and they can last for generations.

Seems like a reasonable place to put my updated NICS data (attached). As of February 1, 2022, there have been 414,167,642 completed NICS checks since the program began at the end of 1998. The 20-year period ending with December 2021 accounts for 384,091,593 of those checks.

The BATF tracks the production (of course it's the fire-control "firearm" part of the firearm only) of all federally licensed firearm manufacturers in the U.S., but I can't find data for 2020 yet, only through 2019. Going back several years those numbers are:

• 2019: 7,011,945
• 2018: 9,052,628
• 2017: 8,327,792
• 2016: 11,497,441
• 2015: 9,358,661
• 2014: 9,050,626
• 2013: 10,844,792
• 2012: 8,578,610

That's a total of 73,722,495; the total of 2000 through 2019 is 123,096,334. Additionally, the BATF also tracks the importation of firearms into the U.S., but I've had more difficulty finding data for that. I found info for 2020, though, and the total number of imported firearms topped 6.83 million. Interestingly, Turkey was the largest importer with 1,490,251...Canik Arms alone can't account for those numbers...with Austria second and Brazil third.

So if we use the 2018 manufacturing numbers of 9.06 million (because they were a bit higher than the flanking 2017 and 2019) and the 2020 imports of 6.83 million, that's about a 75% ratio of imports to U.S. manufactured. Extrapolating that for each year 2012 through 2019 would give us 55,291,871 imported firearms, and for 2000 through 2019 inclusive, 92,322,251. The local plus import total for 2000 through 2019, then, would be about 215,418,585 newly manufactured firearms entering the marketplace, or about 10.77 million each year on average for the past 20 years.

Paladin wrote: ↑Tue Feb 08, 2022 8:54 am John Lott weighs in:

Democrats Pushing Gun Registry as Precursor to Gun Ban

Two-thirds of Republicans believe the policy will lead to gun confiscation, and even 40 percent of Democrats believe the same. Confiscating legally owned firearms, it seems, is not merely a right-wing conspiracy theory.

Confiscation is the only thing registration is good for:

In a 2001 lawsuit, the Pennsylvania state police could not identify any crimes solved by their registration system from 1901 to 2001; however they did claim that it had “assisted” in a total of four cases, for which they could provide no details.

In a 2013 deposition for District of Columbia v. Heller II, the plaintiffs recorded that the Washington, D.C. police chief could not “recall any specific instance where registration records were used to determine who committed a crime, except for possession offenses.”

During testimony before the Hawaii State Senate in 2000, Honolulu’s police chief stated that he couldn’t find any crimes that had been solved due to registration and licensing. The chief also said that his officers devoted about 50,000 hours to registering and licensing guns each year. This is time that could have been spent on traditional, time-tested law enforcement activities.

New York and Maryland spent tens of millions of dollars putting together a computer database on all new guns sold in the past 15 years, even recording the ballistic fingerprint of each gun. But even these states, which strongly favor gun control, eventually abolished their systems because they never solved a single crime.

But, hey, it's only common sense, right? So what if it's provably useless to law enforcement and costs millions and millions of dollars and consumes the already very limited amounts of law enforcement officer time and training. It's just common sense that the government would want to know where all the guns are, right? And it isn't just the guy living on rural property who has a circa 1980 double-barrel shotgun to take birds. No, what we really need to know about are the people who have arsenals of two or more guns and over 100 rounds of ammunition. After all, domestic extremism is the number one threat to our democracy--the government has been telling us that over and over throughout the Biden administration--and we need to keep track of all these right-wingers. It's only common sense.

Wait. What? I thought there were about 300 million guns in civilian hands in the United States. What do you mean there could be as many as one billion?! How are we ever going to confisca... I mean, how will we be able to understand who has them without a federal database?

</sarcasm>