Survey: More Guns Than People in the U.S.

The most recent Small Arms Survey finds there are more privately owned firearms than people in the United States.

The Washington Post reports that the survey reveals over 393 million civilians own guns in the U.S. That is “enough for every man, woman and child to own one and still have 67 million guns left over.”

To put it another way, there are roughly 120.5 guns per 100 U.S. residents.

This dovetails perfectly with 2017 research which found that “Americans made up 4 percent of the world’s population but owned about 46 percent of the entire global stock of 857 million civilian firearms.”

The Small Arms Survey found that U.S. “civilians acquired at least 122 million new or imported firearms during the period 2006–17,” and there was an major expansion of firearm sales during 2009-2013, the Obama years.

There were 19 consecutive months of record firearm sales, May 2015 through November 2016. Gun sales then dropped closer to normal but took off again with the gun control activism that followed the February 14 Parkland school shooting. Breitbart News reported that March, April, and May 2018 each set records for the number of background checks performed for gun sales.

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets with AWR Hawkins, and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.