How Many Guns, How Much Ammunition

Several someones stopped by searching for “how many guns in circulation in the U.S.”

Another popular search asks “how many ammunition in us.”

We really cannot have an exact count on the number of guns in circulation in the United States. There are too many guns, too widely dispersed to ever learn that.

But what we can do is to first take the number of guns produced as far back as records run, estimate total production from known numbers until those run out, and then estimate the total number of surviving guns from the number of guns of a given year of production offered for sale.

Between the number of surving guns from the 19th century, production and d survival numbers from the 20th Century, and manufacturing and import numbers for the 21st Century we should have between 710 and 770 million guns that are either serviceable, or easily restored to service. That is, guns that have no broken parts or serious internal rust problems, needing only a clean and lube to restore to working order.

On that basis, we ESTIMATE there are 740 million firearms that are A.) Servicible as is: B.) or easily restored to service. This does not include firearms in caliber such as .41 Rimfire for which ammunition is essentially unavailable.

For the second question, how many rounds ammunition Americans hold,we must again stretch the known data until it screams in agony. Various sources guess the number of rounds at anything from 500 million to five trillion rounds. Obviously, both extremes are absurd.

The United States began the 20th century with an estimated production capacity of 2 billion rounds a year. At the beginning of the 21st century, estimate production capacity was 10.8 billion rounds a year, and current estimates of ammunition production is still under 14 billion rounds a year…

If every cartridge loaded during the 20th century were still unfired, we would have 560 billion rounds of ammunition on had. Obviously, higher 10 billion rounds on hand are preposterious, and given the general shortage of ammunition, estimates ov more than 2.4 billion rounds are unlikely.

On the other hand, estimates of less than two billion rounds are also unlikely. .

Numerically, the most likely number is close to 2.4 billion rounds on hand. And, while production has increased sharply, as have imports, millions of new gun buyers are shooting up fresh ammunition supplies about as fast as it can be made.

Continue reading here: How Much Has The Latest Gun Control Campaign Cost?

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