Friday, January 10, 2020

New ATF study

It seems that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and whatever else, EIEIO, is conducting studies trying to figure out how many firearms and how much ammo is in the hands of law-abiding Americans.  My first reaction was that the ATFEIEIO guys have more to do than tally numbers, but if they are doing that, they aren't abusing good Americans.  THey are wastinng tax money, but we've come to expect that.

My second reaction is that their numbers are abysmally low.
Newly released figures from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives shows that there are now a whopping 422.9 million guns in the hands of Americans. The number equates to 1.2 guns for every person in the country.
 The figures also reveal that the most popular firearm in the country is the much maligned sporting rifle, often mis-identified as an “assault rifle”, the AR-15 being one of the more popular models.
They also estimate that 8.1 billion rounds of ammo were produced last year.  I have no idea about that, but I bet that they didn't take into account the hundreds of thousands of us who produce our own ammo.  I suspect that the amount of ammunition in private hands exceeds their numbers by a significant margin.

Disclaimer:  I can't attest to the veracity of the linked article, only noting it for the purpose of discussion.

3 comments:

DaveS said...

Hmmm - just going to hazard a guess that most of your readership would fall into the category of "over-achievers" for both gun and ammunition ownership per capita. For crying out loud - 8.1 billion rounds is only something like 24 or 25 rounds per person.

BobF said...

I have a goodly amount of ammo, but I may have to buy another case just to help screw up their numbers a bit more.

Bradley said...

Everyone I know that is a shooter and they fall in to three main groups, Sport Shooters, Prepers, and hunters, now some fall in to all three, but on ammo count only most have a MSL(min stock level) of the following.
Sport Shooters(think idpa and SASS type stuff) 1K rounds pistol, 500rds rifle, 250 shotgun
Prepers, 2.5K pistol, 1K rifle, 500 Shotgun
Hunters, 100 pistol, 60 rifle, 25 shotgun.

Now a lot of cross over in the groups, and a few of the prepers I know have different stock/calibers for sport shooting vs end of the world sort of stuff.

with the above in mind, I think that ammo count in the US is way low, like a factor of 10 or 30 low.